THE GOVERNMENT must not allow plans to cut UK carbon emissions to be suspended until after 2015, the Green Party warns.
Penny Kemp, the Green Party’s Environment Spokesperson, said the government must act to combat climate change now.
She said: ‘Yet again, this Government exposes its hypocrisy. It calls itself a Green government but its actions show that the Prime Minister’s words are hollow.’
Ministers from the Treasury and the Department of Energy and Climate Change are understood to have reached an impasse in negotiations over whether to include targets to slash national emissions by 2030 in its Energy Bill, or postpone a decision until the next Parliament.
But the targets, set by the government’s independent Committee on Climate Change (CCC), will cost less than one per cent of national GDP and could help save the world from environmental catastrophe.
The CCC set targets to reduce total carbon dioxide emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, and added recommendations for levels to be achieved by 2030.
Its proposals include cutting transport emissions by 44 per cent by encouraging more electric cars and vans and reducing tailpipe emissions, cutting emissions from buildings by 74 per cent (plus an extra 48 per cent from industrial buildings), cut energy production emissions by 90 per cent and cut agriculture emissions by 0.625 per cent.
The recommendations were made to attempt to make sure the UK keeps its emissions to a rate at which global temperatures increase by two degrees or less. Yesterday morning (Monday November 19), the World Bank report Turn Down the Heat was released, explaining why a two degree increase was the maximum the planet could stand.
The report warns that at present, the rate of carbon emission by each country in the world would lead to a global temperature increase of four degrees centigrade, which would cause a three feet rise in sea levels, cause global flooding, droughts and the loss of vast areas of agricultural land.
It also warns that it would cause summer temperatures to rise by nine degrees centigrade in the European Mediterranean states – the same heat as that recorded in the Libyan desert at summertime.
The Green Party believes that even a reduction to the levels proposed by the CCC is too little to arrest the effects of climate change, but any possibility the government will fail even to achieve this is unacceptable, and potentially disastrous.
Ms Kemp said: ‘This government fails to care about climate change or future generations. All the evidence shows that we are heading towards climate catastrophe.’