Like several of the authorities in the South West, Wiltshire County Council has adopted a policy of aiming towards ‘carbon neutrality’ by 2030. This is considerably faster than the recently-announced UK goal of carbon-neutrality by 2050. Why? What does it really mean?
In one sense the aspiration is realistic. The IPCC recently announced that the world as a whole has only 12 years before the level of accumulated greenhouse gases pushes us beyond the 1.5°C threshold. This is 12 years at present rates of emission, less if rates increase, more if they decline. Let us grandly assume that from 2020 the world will decarbonise steadily to zero. Mathematically that gives us 24 years, still pretty tight, but better. The UK emits at a somewhat higher rate than the average, and in the past has contributed disproportionately to the present burden, so logically it should decarbonise faster. The Extinction Rebellion movement has called for zero by 2025, but this is regarded as impossible in practice, and there is a growing feeling that 2030-2035 is soon enough and actually achievable. It is this gathering consensus that has informed authorities such as Wiltshire to set their targets at 2030.
I have no reason to doubt the Council’s sincerity, but I am fairly sure they have little idea of the implications of their resolution. Possibly they imagine there exist straightforward technical solutions and ‘the boffins will sort them out’. Well, there are indeed solutions, but it is hard to understand what the Council can do that it can actually take responsibility for, because, apart from a few things it really does and spends money on, it has very little money or power, and it has to have either or both.
Why is this? We understand that if the country as a whole reduces its emission, the government takes credit. Indeed it does this year after year as lower and lower levels of emissions are reported. And individuals do it too: they fly less, they buy electric cars, they eat less meat, the turn down the thermostat. Such measures reduce their personal emissions, and they take the credit. You can see how they get the credit, because they changed their habits and paid for the car. But how can a county get credit? What can it do?
There’s another puzzle. If the County wants to get to zero, it assumes it’s getting there from some other level that is not zero. What is that level? Is it for example:
· Emissions that occur right under our noses, from the gas cooker or the car exhaust?
· Emissions from the power stations that generate our electricity, mostly outside the county?
· Emissions from all the institutions, business and public facilities that serve our many needs?
· Wiltshire’s share of all the emissions generated in the UK, including non-energy emissions?
· Wiltshire’s share of all emissions anywhere, generated on behalf of its citizens for goods, flying, shipping, food, materials and so on?
Confronted with these options, in my experience most people go for the last one, that embraces everything. “If it’s done on my behalf, I am responsible” This is both fair and responsible. But it is not what the British Government does. It cherry-picks only the emissions arising in UK territory, and also ignores its very substantial historical emissions. This gives a value about half of what it ‘ought’ to be. To be fair, these are the emissions the UK is legally required to report under the Kyoto Protocol, and are widely thought of as ‘the’ emissions. So, when the headlines report emissions of x million tonnes per year or that ‘emissions fell by y percent last year’, this is the value they are referring to.
Although this value is not really fair or responsible, let us take it as the prevailing norm and apply it to Wiltshire. Suppose the residents of Wiltshire are the same as everyone else in the UK, and that the country as a whole is decarbonising at 3.3% a year. Wiltshire would have to add 6.7% a year to reach zero by 2030. How can it do this? It would have to somehow make this happen much faster than in comparable counties, so that it could reasonably claim ‘we did it’.
This is not the place to parade the details, but I calculate that Wiltshire could meet its UK-level obligations with a mixture of
Conversion of about half grazing land from beef/dairy to crop products and ecosystem services
8000 hectares of biomass plantations
3650 hectares of solar farms, about 1% of the county’s land, and
91 wind farms, each with 10 large turbines rated at 3 megawatts each.
[See more details at Decarbonising Wiltshire in the Climate Change section of the site.]
There is plenty of space, and indeed half of the wind farms could be located on Salisbury Plain. Alternatively, a few small nuclear power stations – presumably also on Salisbury Plain – could generate a similar amount of electricity in much less space and with less visual intrusion, but with the characteristic problems associated with nuclear energy.
These, it seems to me, are the basic implications of the Wiltshire County Council resolution. It would be able to claim ‘credit’ because it would have done the political work of driving these measures through in the teeth of vigorous opposition. I am fairly sure nobody has yet sat down and looked these implications squarely in the face.
