Policy Questions
Analysis is one thing, but naturally we are often challenged about how it should be translated into policy, especially within the UK. In my view the Zero Carbon Britain series remain the most convincing rapid reduction scenarios, and can be accessed via the CAT web site here.
More recently I took advantage of a longer perspective to evaluate the ZCB studies as a whole.
The Legacy of the ZCB Studies (2023)
The UK prides itself on being ahead of the pack when it comes to decarbonisation policies, but its claims do not really stand up to scrutiny, as I tried to demonstrate in a recent paper based on the Kaya Identity here.
Meanwhile the Wiltshire County Council (within whose purlieu I live) announced its intention to achieve net-zero carbon status by 2030. I was quite certain they had no idea what this meant, so wrote a short primer on what it could possibly mean: here.
What the whole world should do is a much more difficult matter. These unpublished discussion papers propose several key notions that would probably be necessary for a successful mitigation effort. They are:
development of a strategic physically-realistic plan
massive expansion and redirection of research effort
'benign geo-engineering' to slow the problem down and keep the 'window' open
a 'parallel narrative' to explain the nature of the transition before it begins
the transition itself, with an urgency and focus normally only found in times of war
As the years pass, it gets more difficult to achieve a credible transition without ‘cheating’, that is to say, using nuclear energy and geoengineering. Curiously, the British Labour Party has no problem here, although the Greens and the Liberal Democrats certainly do. Since it is looking increasingly likely that the Labour Party will lead the next government, the following is a transition plan that could form part of the Labour election manifesto:
A Realistic Transition Plan, with implications for opposition politics (2023)
It is possibly helpful to compare this with earlier general treatments of the theme. It gives a feeling of ‘time travel’ because in earlier times we don’t know what is going to happen.
Rational Response for Governments 2007 (doc)
Building Spitfires 2009 (doc)
A Letter to Wally Broecker 2010 (doc)
The 'letter to Wally Broecker' was inspired by his book Fixing Climate (he is one of the grand old men of climate science, and was a fellow lecturer at the Hay Festival of that year) contains a proposal for the proportions of effort that should be put into sequestration, low-carbon technology, and various kinds of cultural change in the next 200 years. This is only back-of-the-envelope guesstimation, but I have never found anyone to impugn its logic.
Discussions with Japanese colleagues convinced me that the principles behind Zero-Carbon Britain would apply to Japan as well, hence the following, published in the Japanese magaine Biocity (No. 48)