Newsletters from No 10: 22 June 2009
Dear friends
It's been a while since my first email in this series. Time for another.
I am actually writing this from Mexico, where I am attending with Ed Miliband the third preparatory meeting of the Major Economies Forum on Climate and Energy (MEF) convened by the new US Administration. These meetings will culminate in a Leaders Summit alongside the G8, chaired by President Obama, in July. The Summit will be a critical moment in the push towards a new international climate agreement in Copenhagen in December. I will write more on this process at the end of this week, when the Prime Minister and Ed Miliband will be launching the Government's strategy for Copenhagen.
This is a crucial couple of months for us in this field. As well as the Major Economies Forum and G8, July will see the publication of DECC's White Paper on Climate and Energy, the Government's comprehensive strategy on how we will meet our carbon budgets and energy security objectives to 2020. This will include the final versions of our Renewable Energy and Low Carbon Industrial Strategies. Much more on these in due course.
UK CLIMATE PROJECTIONS 09
And we kicked this process off with the publication last week of the UK Climate Projections. You may I hope have seen coverage of these. The Projections are the Met Office Hadley Centre's comprehensively updated scientific projections for the UK climate up to the 2080s, under three different possible emissions scenarios. The Projections use the new probabilistic climate modelling methodology to give 10%, 50% and 90% probabilities of different outcomes for a number of variables including temperature, rainfall and sea levels, for the different regions of the UK broken down into 25km squares.
The Projections are primarily designed to help public authorities, utilities, businesses and others conduct climate risk assessments and plan for investment in adaptation. Under the Climate Change Act all Government departments have to produce Adaptation Plans by spring 2010, and we can require over a hundred bodies providing public services to do the same. The Projections provide the basis for that work, and Defra has published a consultation document alongside them [http://tinyurl.com/lgbrzd] on how the new power could be used. It will also be providing an extensive training programme.
A summary version of the Projections can be accessed through the Defra website at [http://tinyurl.com/6k5pg2], while the full Projections are available to registered users at [http://tinyurl.com/nwd7ql].
Substantively, the Projections show two things above all. The first is that adaptation to climate change, up to now the somewhat poor relation of this field, is going to become more and more important. The timelag between emissions and climate - 30 years or so - means that we are now locked into some extremely uncomfortable changes by the 2040s whatever we do now to mitigate: very high summer temperatures, wetter winters, more frequent extreme weather events and higher risk of coastal erosion and storm surges. We are going to need to plan for these, which is why the adaptation reporting power we took under the CCA is so important. On Friday the Environment Agency followed up the Projections with new estimates of the need for flood defence expenditure over the next 25 years [http://tinyurl.com/kmqr2p]. The NHS already has heatwave plans in place. There will need to be much more focus on this, throughout society, in the future.
Second, the Projections show that the future climate is not fixed. Though the next thirty years of changes are now unavoidable, after the 2040s the impacts from the different emissions scenarios (low, medium and high) diverge hugely. The benefits to the UK of the world being on the low pathway - or lower, as we are actually working for - are enormous. And of course for developing countries and ecosystems they are incalculable. Some of the reporting of the Projections in the media sounded as if there was now nothing we could do about the future climate. But that is emphatically not what they show. On the contrary, they make the case for a Copenhagen agreement limiting the average global rise in temperature to 2C even more starkly. This is our highest priority. More on this, therefore, soon.
CARBON CAPTURE STORAGE AND COAL
One last thing. Last week as well Ed Miliband published the DECC consultation paper on our new, expanded carbon capture and storage demonstration programme and our proposed consenting policy for new coal-fored power stations. [http://tinyurl.com/ladkj7].
The consultation paper sets out the key issues we need to address in implementing the policy Ed announced in April: the requirement for new coal power stations to fit at least partial CCS, up to four demonstrations, a new levy on electricity suppliers to fund these, a retrofit requirement once the technology has been technically and economically proven, and a contingency process in case it is not. The government is open to a number of different ways of addressing the key issues, and keen to hear stakeholders' views.
One of the main questions we need to explore is how to implement our ambition to encourage CCS industrial clusters to maximise the economic and jobs benefits to the UK of these technologies. Alongside the consultation DECC have published an independent report by the AEA Group on the potential in this field: an estimated £2-4 billion a year into the UK economy by 2030, with 30,000-60,000 new jobs in engineering, manufacturing and procurement [link to AEA Report (pdf)]. This is a big prize we are aiming for.
I hope to write with more news on what we're doing soon.
With best wishes
Michael Jacobs
Michael Jacobs
Special Adviser to the Prime Minister
10 Downing St
London SW1A 2AA
It's been a while since my first email in this series. Time for another.
I am actually writing this from Mexico, where I am attending with Ed Miliband the third preparatory meeting of the Major Economies Forum on Climate and Energy (MEF) convened by the new US Administration. These meetings will culminate in a Leaders Summit alongside the G8, chaired by President Obama, in July. The Summit will be a critical moment in the push towards a new international climate agreement in Copenhagen in December. I will write more on this process at the end of this week, when the Prime Minister and Ed Miliband will be launching the Government's strategy for Copenhagen.
This is a crucial couple of months for us in this field. As well as the Major Economies Forum and G8, July will see the publication of DECC's White Paper on Climate and Energy, the Government's comprehensive strategy on how we will meet our carbon budgets and energy security objectives to 2020. This will include the final versions of our Renewable Energy and Low Carbon Industrial Strategies. Much more on these in due course.
UK CLIMATE PROJECTIONS 09
And we kicked this process off with the publication last week of the UK Climate Projections. You may I hope have seen coverage of these. The Projections are the Met Office Hadley Centre's comprehensively updated scientific projections for the UK climate up to the 2080s, under three different possible emissions scenarios. The Projections use the new probabilistic climate modelling methodology to give 10%, 50% and 90% probabilities of different outcomes for a number of variables including temperature, rainfall and sea levels, for the different regions of the UK broken down into 25km squares.
The Projections are primarily designed to help public authorities, utilities, businesses and others conduct climate risk assessments and plan for investment in adaptation. Under the Climate Change Act all Government departments have to produce Adaptation Plans by spring 2010, and we can require over a hundred bodies providing public services to do the same. The Projections provide the basis for that work, and Defra has published a consultation document alongside them [http://tinyurl.com/lgbrzd] on how the new power could be used. It will also be providing an extensive training programme.
A summary version of the Projections can be accessed through the Defra website at [http://tinyurl.com/6k5pg2], while the full Projections are available to registered users at [http://tinyurl.com/nwd7ql].
Substantively, the Projections show two things above all. The first is that adaptation to climate change, up to now the somewhat poor relation of this field, is going to become more and more important. The timelag between emissions and climate - 30 years or so - means that we are now locked into some extremely uncomfortable changes by the 2040s whatever we do now to mitigate: very high summer temperatures, wetter winters, more frequent extreme weather events and higher risk of coastal erosion and storm surges. We are going to need to plan for these, which is why the adaptation reporting power we took under the CCA is so important. On Friday the Environment Agency followed up the Projections with new estimates of the need for flood defence expenditure over the next 25 years [http://tinyurl.com/kmqr2p]. The NHS already has heatwave plans in place. There will need to be much more focus on this, throughout society, in the future.
Second, the Projections show that the future climate is not fixed. Though the next thirty years of changes are now unavoidable, after the 2040s the impacts from the different emissions scenarios (low, medium and high) diverge hugely. The benefits to the UK of the world being on the low pathway - or lower, as we are actually working for - are enormous. And of course for developing countries and ecosystems they are incalculable. Some of the reporting of the Projections in the media sounded as if there was now nothing we could do about the future climate. But that is emphatically not what they show. On the contrary, they make the case for a Copenhagen agreement limiting the average global rise in temperature to 2C even more starkly. This is our highest priority. More on this, therefore, soon.
CARBON CAPTURE STORAGE AND COAL
One last thing. Last week as well Ed Miliband published the DECC consultation paper on our new, expanded carbon capture and storage demonstration programme and our proposed consenting policy for new coal-fored power stations. [http://tinyurl.com/ladkj7].
The consultation paper sets out the key issues we need to address in implementing the policy Ed announced in April: the requirement for new coal power stations to fit at least partial CCS, up to four demonstrations, a new levy on electricity suppliers to fund these, a retrofit requirement once the technology has been technically and economically proven, and a contingency process in case it is not. The government is open to a number of different ways of addressing the key issues, and keen to hear stakeholders' views.
One of the main questions we need to explore is how to implement our ambition to encourage CCS industrial clusters to maximise the economic and jobs benefits to the UK of these technologies. Alongside the consultation DECC have published an independent report by the AEA Group on the potential in this field: an estimated £2-4 billion a year into the UK economy by 2030, with 30,000-60,000 new jobs in engineering, manufacturing and procurement [link to AEA Report (pdf)]. This is a big prize we are aiming for.
I hope to write with more news on what we're doing soon.
With best wishes
Michael Jacobs
Michael Jacobs
Special Adviser to the Prime Minister
10 Downing St
London SW1A 2AA
