COPout: What the 1950s can teach us about tackling the emissions crisis
The Great Smog of London was a lethal smog that covered England’s capital for five successive days back in 1952.
Claiming upwards of 12,000 lives, it was the catalyst for much-heralded legislation: the Clean Air Act of 1956 (1956 Act). This milestone moment in environmental law for the first time set about reducing harmful emissions across both domestic and industrial applications.
It took a further 30 years and another piece of follow-on legislation to finally see skies clear in the 80s.
The Climate Change Act 2008 (2008 Act)
The 1956 Act did not set the type of limits on air quality we debate today. Instead, it designated problem areas, empowered actions and backed these up with money, including grants to householders to rip out polluting boilers, fireplaces and ovens.
As the 1956 Act focused on reducing the use of coal, the 2008 Act focuses on reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050, compared to 1990 levels. The focus is also known as the 2050 target, and it was recommended by the Committee on Climate Change.
The 2050 target concerns emissions of all the main greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and fluorinated gases) from all domestic sources. Although emissions from international aviation and shipping are excluded from the carbon account, they are included in the 2050 target along with the carbon budgets.
Carbon budgets are set 12 years ahead of time. They are adopted by Parliament through separate dedicated secondary legislation on the advice of the independent Committee on Climate Change. The 12-year lead time provides important long-term guidance to investors, but it also insulates the budget setting process against short-term political calculations. Moreover, each carbon budget provides a five-year, statutory cap on economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions over that period. Taken together, sequential carbon budgets should define a cost-effective path towards the 2050 objective.
There are five carbon budgets that have been set in law up to date, covering the period from 2008 to 2032. The latest, the 5th carbon budget, limits UK greenhouse gas emissions from all sources. Yet, it excludes international aviation and shipping, to 1,725 million tonnes of carbon dioxide between 2028 and 2032. This is equivalent to a 57% reduction in annual UK emissions over this period on average, relative to 1990 levels.
In comparison to the 1965 Act, the Climate Change Act 2008 focus is on emissions measuring them on a production basis, and in accordance with international conventions such as the 2050 target. In hindsight it may be that the 2050 target merely concerns greenhouse gases emitted in the UK, rather than the emissions embedded in the goods and services the UK consumes. It is also noted that the public debate focuses on pollutants from traffic and the role of carbon dioxide in our climate emergency. There is a need to go further and understand how air quality impacts on public health. The air has now become a precious resource for healthy life and must not be used for waste disposal.
Current Climate Legislation Challenges (2008 Act Focus)
Ineffective
The most recent Supreme Court case on the Heathrow third runway is arguably the most extensive judicial reasoning on current UK climate change law to date. Friends of the Earth and Plan B Earth, challenged the lawfulness of the Secretary of State’s designation on a number of climate change-related grounds, including that the Airports National Policy Statement (ANPS) had not considered the UK Government’s commitments under the Paris Agreement (ratified by the UK Government in November 2016).
However, the Supreme Court held that their claims based on section 1 and 4 of the Climate Change Act 2008 to be far more demanding than the limits which the UK is currently obliged to have in place under the Paris Agreement.
The effectiveness of current climate legislation should be challenged on an ongoing basis to assure the public and investors that the goals around climate and beyond are well and truly served.
Over Complicated
Ignoring wider environmental protection legislation for the purpose of this article, the 2008 Act is still a beast. Evidently too slow a call to action, plus over-controlled by politicians influenced by powerful energy and other industry corporations.
For successful legislative action at scale across all industries within a few decades, the laws must be drafted simply and be accessible by non-legal professionals to take successful effect. The 1956 Act was precisely this.
Under Regulated
UK regulation on sustainable development is largely devoid. The effectiveness of a new environmental protection quango is yet to be tested. For me, we ought to be looking across all industries for greater duties of care to social, environmental and economic interests of the wider world when it comes to deals and operations.
Rather than the effective adoption and compliance of flowed down obligations from front-line service delivery back to international treaty level, arguably sustainable development goal obligations have largely fallen to the private agreements between parties, business to business and / or to consumer.
The UK Government’s Social Value Model is new and welcome; however, it does continue to raise legal application in public procurement concerns if not implemented and managed with the right expertise levels for evaluation and contract management.
Heavily Conflicted
So long as energy and other industry corporations are influencing national and international legislation enacted through Governments and world leaders to protect corporate self-interests, the entire foundation for all the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, including Climate Action (SDG13), is unstable due to conflicts of interests and corruption that results in high-risk fragility for investors.
Whilst calls for greater transparency that sheds light on the influences corporations have on climate legislation, the public appetite today is to focus efforts on successful outcomes from the investment and transformation plans underway to protect our planet’s populations, environments, ecosystems and economies.
To assure green investment pledge success, simple and effective steps backed by meaningful legislation and regulation must be part of the overall green industrial revolution planning and rollout. Otherwise, we have infrastructure built on sand.
Finance Centric
Legislation that protects public health, safety and reverses environmental damage for urgency ought to have the intervention powers that remedy the harms caused with immediate results (ponder on response to COVID-19 to some extent). Dependencies on green energy and finance transition to new emerging markets including sustainable development financial initiatives is the long-term goal, but the overall crisis solution and acute interventions is long overdue.
Environment Act 2021
Despite the legislative approach, the air pollution is still latent, and there are opinions from various institution and international organisation calling for more collective and comprehensive measures in place.
Currently, in the UK, the Government has been working towards a new Environment Act (The New Act), which was enacted into law this November, 2021. How it will affect the quality of air must be tested and may result in the local authorities to do more than what they have currently implemented.
The New Act delivers key aspects of the UK’s Clean Air Strategy with the aim of maximising health benefits for our citizens and sits alongside our wider action on air quality, and introduces a legally-binding duty on the Government to bring forward at least two air quality targets by October 2022:
(1) The first is to reduce the annual average level of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in ambient air. This will deliver substantial public health benefits.
(2) The second air quality target must be a long-term target (set a minimum of 15 years in the future), which will encourage long-term investment and provide certainty for businesses and other stakeholders. The environmental targets policy paper published in August 2020 outlined the proposal to break new ground and focus this target on reducing population exposure to PM2.5.
The principle of a population exposure reduction target is to prioritise action that is most beneficial for public health and drive continuous improvement. This target will drive improvement across all areas of the country, even in areas that already meet the new minimum standard for PM2.5.
This approach recognises there is no safe level or standard of PM2.5.
A new concentration target for PM2.5 will act as a minimum standard across the country, and a population exposure reduction target (PERT) will prioritise action to secure the biggest public health benefits drive continuous improvement across the whole country, not just in pollution hotspots.
Conclusion
Like a Schrodinger’s cat, the making of the 2050 targets to render a leeway to certain industry sectors could be a key factor why the law has not been effective to tackle air pollution. As opposed to how the legislative approach was done to reduce the coal consumption in the 1956 act, current law seems to have hindered the effect of reducing greenhouse gases and air pollution.
It has been over 60 years since the UK first led the world in tackling air pollution by introducing the landmark 1956 Clean Air Act. Yet the air pollution problem is still present and there are opinions from various institutions and international organisations calling for new legislation to be put in place.
A public consultation on proposed targets is due for publication in early 2022. The level and achievement date for both targets will be set in secondary legislation. Let us witness how quick progress is made with the enactment of new legislation.
The time for change is certainly now.
Meow.
