Crossing fingers and hoping for the best is hardly a sensible way to tackle the climate emergency, but it is a strategy that the government seems determined to follow. Today, it launched its revised net zero plan, which turns out to be more a damp squib than a rocket that will ignite a desperately needed green transformation of the energy landscape. Widely dismissed as half-baked and utterly lacking in ambition, it pledges no new money and most of the initiatives flagged are based on government commitments that have already been touted. The truth is that the entire exercise is a smoke-and-mirrors attempt to conceal the fact that business as usual remains the order of the day.
At the heart of the strategy is the intention to unleash a new wave of UK oil and gas exploration – an astonishing and, frankly, dangerous path to take at the height of a climate emergency that is set to deepen year on year, in the absence of massive cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. The government is attempting to justify the unjustifiable by talking up a technology known as carbon capture and storage (CCS), which seeks to apprehend carbon dioxide (CO2) before it gets into the atmosphere and store it underground. Nowhere has CCS been tried and tested at the sort of scale that would be required to cancel out the emissions arising from the proposed dash for more gas and oil.
