Can we achieve Zero emissions?

The fact that the UK amended the Climate Change Act 2008 to set a target of 0% greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 may turn out to be the single, most significant environmental move of our time.

Mathematically, it doesn’t necessarily look all that much more ambitious than the previous target of 80%, basically, it’s just moving from four-fifths to five fifths. Practically, however, it’s taken what was already a major challenge and turned it into a monumental one. Monumental, seems an appropriate term, since, one way or another, the target will stand out as a landmark in the UK’s history.

Failure may be a possibility, but it is not really an option
When Parliament updated the act, it noted that the more ambitious target was still within the economic cost it accepted when legislating the 80% target stated in the 2008 Act. The basic fact of the matter, however, is that reducing greenhouse gases is a prerequisite to avoiding catastrophic climate change and therefore the standard cost/benefit analysis process simply does not apply. In very simple terms, the UK cannot afford to fail in this.

What needs to happen for the UK to achieve 0% emissions by 2050
Reducing carbon emissions basically requires reducing the use of carbon fuels and there are three areas on which the UK government is planning to focus.

A switch to low-carbon electricity

In simple terms, electricity can be produced by burning carbon fuels, or through the use of renewables (in the UK principally water and wind but also solar) or through “clean” energy sources such as nuclear power. If the UK is to meet its targets, it needs to reduce the quantity of electricity produced through the use of carbon-based fuels.

The most obvious side to this is to ramp up the production of energy from renewable and clean sources and there are two aspects to achieving this. One is quantity and the other is efficiency. Of these, quantity is probably easier to achieve since it simply requires the implementation of facilities to collect renewable energy and/or to produce clean energy. At this point, however, it’s worth pointing out that “easier” does not mean the same as “easy”. If the UK is going to meet its targets (which it cannot afford to miss), it will have to take advantage of every possible source of renewable/clean energy and that may mean squeezing facilities into the most challenging of locations.

The other main aspect is efficiency and this is probably where there is most scope for advances to be made, especially with regard to renewables. One of the big challenges with renewable energy is that it is dependent on a fairly constant supply of the energy source, which effectively means that the feasibility of using renewables as an energy source currently varies widely according to local climates. If, however, captured energy could be stored for longer, then it could be banked against periods when the energy source was not available.

A switch away from carbon heating in buildings

In principle, the switch away from carbon heating in buildings should just be a case of changing out heating infrastructure. In practice, however, “carbon heating in buildings” essentially means “gas boilers”. There are very few buildings in the UK still using solid-fuel fires of any description, at least not for main heating, barbeques tend to be solid fuel and do contribute to emissions, but that is another topic. In practice, however, people in parts of the UK with severe weather are likely to have a huge preference for gas as it is much less likely to be subject to storm disruption. This is a reasonable concern which civil engineers will have to find a way to address.