That’s the ambitious plan proposal launched by Ming Campbell today and set to be debated at the party’s autumn conference next month.
Full details of the plan, along with the document to be debated at conference, are over on the Liberal Democrat website.
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19 Comments
Carbon neutrality by 2050 is an exciting prospect, and a high speed railway is very welcome as the current rail network (in comparison with French TGVs, for example) discourages people from getting out of their cars and into trains.
It’s great that we are continuing to push ahead at the forefront of green politics. It certainly shows up the half-baked plans that the Tories have… actually, do they have any?
The Guardian seem to think the plan involves banning all petrol cars by 2040. The headline is even worse. Unfortunate.
The policy document actually says all *new* cars should have zero carbon emissions by 2040 — so existing cars and classic cars would be able to stay on the road.
100% non-nuclear carbon-free electricityby 2050?
How exactly?
We are struggling to meet the commitments that already exist. Nothing ever seem to get done to move towards commitments that are more than 5 years in the future. Can I be forgiven for thinking that huge distant commitments are impotent?
The sort of commitment I would like to see is to get renewable plant under construction within 5 years to meet x% of the country’s electricity demand.
Joe: have you taken a look at p.16-20 of the policy document?
Whilst I kind of agree with Joe – anyone’s who has been through time and priority management training will have learned to break things down into bite sized chunks with SMART targets – I don’t wish to dissmiss this effort. Maybe there’s something in the detail though that I’ve missed that covers this but when we talk about “zero carbon” do we just mean in terms of recurring useage as opposed to embodied carbon?
For example, many current building techniques and materials, whilst being potential superinsulators and thermal mass, also create a lot of carbon in the initial production – concrete being an obvious example. How does such embodied carbon get factored into such ambitious policy plans? I’m genuinely curious.
Also, I’ve seen this statement from us somewhere previously (maybe at GLD conference):
5.1.8 Three quarters of the housing stock that will be used in 2050 has already been built.
And I just don’t believe it frankly. I’d say most of what’s been built in the last fifty years had an inbuilt 50 or so year lifespan and a huge amount of inter-war year housing is already running out of lifespan. There is a big debate about whether to prolong its life through measures such as proposed in this paper and wholesale rebuilding which would also enable us to change infrastructure and adapt to living patterns.
I believe that we will be living and working (or wanting to do so) in very different ways inside the next couple of decades let alone by 2050. The focus will be more on living communities than on proximity to current employment opportunities as the ability to operate at a distance is enhanced. We could see a revival of villages and high intensity living in city cores, but with suburbia gradually decaying, for example.
Mark, thanks for that reference.
The first time I looked, I got as far at 4.2.2 and gave up on the chapter. In fact there are better policies further on. With feed-in tarrifs in 4.2.6, breaking the market completely with 4.2.2 is pointless as well as wrong-headed.
OK there are some good and semi-good ideas in there, along with a few things that I would oppose.
So I have an issue with the presentation: ambitious distant targets – the political reality of which is discussed well here: http://baconbutty.blogspot.com/2007/08/escaping-absurd-eu-renewables-target.html
And my usual grumble – that environmentalism too often supports shopping lists of measures, some of which are good, in preference to rigorous solutions – seems to apply to the detail.
Jock asks about embodied carbon. If it is made here, it is counted here. So bricks we make here (whether used here or abroad) are included, whereas bricks made elsewhere (whether used here or elsewhere) are not. This is the way all international CO2 targets are framed, and is the only way that we can operate this sort of policy. In some ways that gives us a headstart, as we import carbon-intensive manufacturers, and export carbon –light services. But that advantage declines over time, as the CO2 of a NY-Berlin passenger flying via London counts as British CO2 output.
Mountjoy says: “and a high speed railway is very welcome as the current rail network (in comparison with French TGVs, for example) discourages people from getting out of their cars and into trains.”
And what about the COST of rail travel?
It is much cheaper to travel to and from most places by car. The exception being Central London, where parking is prohibitively expensive.
Also, public transport often fails to take us where we want.
How does one travel from Dartford to Maidstone or Tunbridge Wells by train or bus? Or from Dartford to Swanley, even (just next door)?
And what do you do if you live in a town like Llandrindod Wells that has two trains per day? Walk the 40 miles to Hereford?
As for parking charges, is this really an environmental protection device or just an excuse to fleece motorists?
I never pay to park on principle. I much prefer a longer walk. As do many others. The infirm and disabled, of course, have to pay. Not the groups the CPZ zealots want to target, but they are the victims nonetheless.
And what about consistency?
Wareham charges you to park on Sundays. Salisbury doesn’t. Why is this? In Wareham, those who get hit are (a) the hapless tourists who don’t know you can park for free a few streets away and (b) those who have difficulty walking. Hardly fair, is it?
I’m all for persecuting people with gas-guzzling vehicles, however. Except for farmers and others who actually need them. A 4X4 has become something of a status symbol for the nouveau riche, rather like paved-over gardens and tacky Doric porches.
“How does one travel from Dartford to Maidstone or Tunbridge Wells by train or bus? Or from Dartford to Swanley, even (just next door)?”
Respectively:
Train to Chatham and then the 101 bus.
477 bus to Orpington and then train to Tunbridge Wells.
477 bus direct from one to the other.
All quite doable by public transport I think.
The headline about high-speed rail is important, as it acts on a number of levels: essential investment to spread economic growth over the whole country by reducing travel times; a commitment to scrap the Whitehall roads culture that has engulfed Labour (or is it the other way round?), and of course an essential part of tackling climate change.
Now, if we could get rid of the pirates that run half our railways, that would be even better…
*sigh* I’d hope that the Lib Dems could come up with some other policies than yet another ban for change…
I agree with Angus that the cost of rail travel puts a lot of people off, and Daniel you’re spot on what you say about the economic benefits of high-speed rail travel.
I am entirely unconvinced that we will ever be carbon neutral as a country, particularly with the dubious benefits of carbon offsetting that are included in the proposals. Low carbon is good enough for me. – Proposals on rail are very welcome though.
I am always surprised at how keen people are to invoke high speed trains as a way to reduce global warming. As Prof Roger Kemp (http://www.engineering.lancs.ac.uk/research/download/Environmental%20impact.pdf) shows, once you get over about 225kmph rail energy consumption increases so that by 350kmph a train creates as much CO2 as a plane and more than a car (Obviously that is not true in nuclear powered France).
More generally, although building new rail lines will cut air travel, you don’t want to overstate the effect. BA still have 11 flights a day to Paris, Air France has 18, EasyJet 4, maybe there are others as well. New transport links also increase travel, and that generally increases carbon emissions.
“Train to Chatham and then the 101 bus.
477 bus to Orpington and then train to Tunbridge Wells.
477 bus direct from one to the other.”
Thanks for this information, Mark.
Question: How long do these journeys take?
By car:
Dartford to Tunbridge Wells – 40 mins.
Dartford to Maidstone – 30 mins.
(In both cases, I have calculated the time it takes to reach the perimeter of each town. If KCC is digging up the road in two places, then many minutes are added.)
“I am always surprised at how keen people are to invoke high speed trains as a way to reduce global warming”
But what is the carbon emission per passenger? How many people does a high-speed train carry compared with a jumbo jet? Also, you limit the pollution to the power-station, all of which will probably be nuclear by mid-century. And they are much quieter.
If we could get a high-speed train that runs from Waterloo to Benidorm, then that would be great for the environment.
To clarify for Angus, the figures I quoted are per passenger, assuming equal load factors (in reality trains usually have lower load factors than planes)
My BoE numbers for what ‘Clean, Low Carbon Electricity’ means.
Current UK electricity generation: ~70GW
Coal+Gas is 72% of that so: ~50GW
Nuclear is 19% of that so: ~13GW
For a total of 63GW that will need replacing with wind, solar, biogas, cogen, microgen etc etc
Then you need to add a factor for growth in energy demand over the next 33 years. This will come from economic growth (the rule of 70 means that 2.1% exponentiated will give you a doubling near enough) and increased demand from all the PHEVs and high-speed trains that we’re going to need (call it a further 50%). So that comes to 160GW or thereabouts.
But there needs to be an allowance for ‘negawatts’ to account for the improved efficiency that will follow from putting a price on carbon, going to sensible building standards and so on. There’s plenty of low hanging fruit there so knock off a third from the target, which means we’re looking at a final build target of ~105GW over the next 33 years.
Knock off a few gigawatts for friends and call it a build target of 3GW/year. Does that sound reasonable?
Regards
Luke