The UK has the world’s toughest targets for cutting the carbon emissions that create global warming and George Osborne very clearly had these in his sights at the Conservative party conference.
“We’re not going to save the planet by putting our country out of business,” he said. “So let’s at the very least resolve that we’re going to cut our carbon emissions no slower but also no faster than our fellow countries in Europe. That’s what I’ve insisted on in the recent carbon budget.”
But can he actually weaken the targets? It looks unlikely, but highly polluting businesses are likely to get exemptions or handouts to ease the impact of new regulations to curb carbon.
The budget he referred to was approved in May and is now enshrined in law. It commits the UK to a 50% cut by 2025. It was passed after a bitter cabinet row that needed David Cameron’s intervention. The price exacted by Osborne, and his unlikely ally Vince Cable, the business secretary, was a review in 2014. That review will be carried out by the government’s official advisers, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), which is tasked with proposing carbon budgets.
“In order to change any legislated target there must be, in the words of the Climate Change Act, a ‘significant change in circumstances’,” David Kennedy, chief executive of the CCC, told the Guardian. “I am not expecting that.”