How UK Climate Change Policy Has Been Made Sustainable
| Published date | 01 September 2015 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663915589218 |
| Date | 01 September 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Social & Legal Studies
2015, Vol. 24(3) 399–418
How UK Climate
ª The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permission:
Change Policy Has Been
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663915589218
Made Sustainable
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David Campbell
Lancaster University, UK
Abstract
UK climate change policy is based on the advice of the Committee on Climate Change
established under the Climate Change Act 2008. This Committee is an independent,
expert agency established as part of the reconceiving of the regulatory state as a
response to the neo-liberal critique of older forms of regulation. But the quality of the
advice given in the Committee’s recent Fourth Carbon Budget Review is so tendentious as
to barely be able to be described as advice at all. This grave shortcoming poses the most
serious questions for contemporary constitutional and regulatory processes.
Keywords
Climate change, Committee on Climate Change, public policy formulation, regulation,
government failure
Introduction: The Failure of International Climate Change
Policy
‘Alarmed’ by the inability of more than a quarter century of international climate change
negotiations to make progress towards a legally binding commitment to global reduc-
tions in anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the United Nations (UN)
Secretary-General convened a Climate Change Summit in New York on 23 September
2014 (Ban, 2014). As will be described in this article, the current stated aim of negoti-
ations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is to reach a
global reductions agreement at the Climate Change Conference to be held in Paris at the
Corresponding author:
David Campbell, Law School, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YN, UK.
Email: d.campbell1@lancaster.ac.uk
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end of 2015. The New York summit was extraordinary in the sense that it was held
entirely outside of the UN process in an attempt to give a stimulus to negotiations per-
ceived to have stalled (Brown, 2014; Rowling, 2014). But it was perfectly normal in that,
despite some very misleading public pronouncements about its results, it yielded nothing
of any substance whatsoever.1
It was, however, impossible that it could have had a productive outcome. Although
162 countries were represented, 122 by Heads of State or Heads of Government, with
Prime Minister Cameron attending in person, crucially President Xi Jinping of China and
Prime Minister Modi of India did not attend, despite the strenuous efforts of the Secre-
tary General and other senior figures of UN climate change policy to persuade them to do
so (Darby, 2014; Press Trust of India, 2014). President Xi and Mr Modi are the leaders of
the two countries which, for reasons which will emerge, will themselves determine
whether global emissions reductions can ever take place. Yet again affirming the nego-
tiating position they have adamantinely maintained for more than a quarter century
(Gupta and Chaudhary, 2014)2 and which, as will be discussed, they strenuously
affirmed at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in 2009, China and India com-
pletely undermined the New York Summit before it began (Westcott, 2014).3
Prime Minister Cameron’s attendance at the Summit poses a most serious question
about the way UK climate change policy has been and continues to be formulated. His
attendance evidences the UK’s belief, in defiance of China’s and India’s negotiating
position, that a global emissions reductions agreement can be reached at the end of
2015. The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change went far further than one
recognizes that his office demands by claiming that the Summit was a ‘successful start’
to this process of agreement (Davey, 2014).
It is crucial to note that the position of United Kingdom is by no means merely a ques-
tion of a foreign policy stance. Behind that stance lies the simply enormous investment
that the UK has made under the Climate Change Act 2008 (CCA) to a domestic policy of
‘decarbonization’ in pursuit of global emissions reductions. For, other than Money Bills,
there is no body of legislation that will have a greater effect on the prospects for the UK
economy than the measures taken in response to what the UNFCCC calls ‘dangerous
anthropological interference’ (DAI) in the global climate caused by GHG emissions. The
centrepiece of this legislation is the CCA but the Energy Act 2013 is a measure of major
significance in itself. As with all aspects of debate in this area, the costs which the
Energy Act in particular, and the policy of decarbonization under the CCA in general,
have imposed and will impose on UK business, and so, of course, ultimately on UK con-
sumers and taxpayers, are a matter of intense dispute.4 That these costs are so immense
as to be of macroeconomic significance is, however, beyond dispute, and to say this is, in
a very important sense, enough for the purposes of evaluating UK climate change policy.
Complicated and controversial estimates of the costs and benefits of that policy are fun-
damentally redundant because, without a complete change in the international position,
it is impossible that UK climate change policy can make any contribution at all to the
avoidance of DAI.
The ‘First Commitment Period’ under the Kyoto Protocol came to an end on 31
December 2012 (UN, 1997, Article 3(1)). Coming 15 years after the Protocol (and 20
years after the Framework Convention) opened for signature, this was a time to take
Campbell
401
stock of what climate change action had achieved. Unfortunately, less than nothing had
been achieved. GHG emissions were at least 150% of their level in 1990, the year
selected as a baseline for assessing GHG reductions under the Protocol. Not achieving
any reductions, indeed not preventing emissions’ very substantial growth, obviously rep-
resents the complete failure of international climate change policy so far.
The principal reason for this failure is the growth in emissions by the major industria-
lizing countries, on which, in the interests of brevity, I shall focus on China, though India
is in substantial part a duplicate case. China’s immense economic growth since 1979,
generally at 10% per annum, has led to it becoming the world’s largest emitter, now
responsible for more than 30% of global emissions. What is more, China still has much
to do. China has a population of over 1.3 billion, that is, it has a billion more people than
the United States. The benefits of China’s growth have been concentrated on the more
than 250 million now living in or around its major coastal cities. Its hinterland population
is still very poor. There are almost a billion people in China living on less than US$5/day
and over 500 million living on less than US$2.50. This is reflected in China’s per capita
emissions still being a third of those of the United States. If China’s policy of extending
the benefits of its growth to its poverty-stricken hinterland is successful, the growth of its
emissions will itself continue to make global reductions impossible.
Unless it is reversed, China’s position makes the UK’s climate change policy irra-
tional. The UK is responsible for 2% of global emissions. Nothing it can itself do can
secure global reductions. Nothing the European Union (EU) or all the developed world
can do can secure global reductions unless the trajectory of Chinese emissions is radi-
cally changed. Without such change, the immense costs imposed by the CCA can yield
no benefit at all.
Nevertheless, the principal agency charged with providing the UK government with
advice on climate change policy, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) has, in part
15 of its widely publicized (e.g. Chestney, 2014; Gosden, 2014; Harribin, 2014) Fourth
Carbon Budget Review (CCC, 2013b, Chapter 2), emphatically endorsed continuation
with the decarbonization policy after having considered the ‘international circum-
stances’ of its application. This article examines the nature of this advice as a key ele-
ment of the process of policy formulation that has made it possible for the UK
government to sustain its climate change policy.
This article is not, in the first instance, an article about climate change policy as such
but is about the constitutional and administrative law of that policy. What I have just
written about China and India summarizes an argument, which my colleagues and I first
placed in the public domain in 2007, that unless China (and India) completely change
their positions there will be no global emissions reductions (Campbell, 2013a; Campbell
et al., 2010a). Although I refer the reader to these articles, I will not go further into their
argument here because, to all those whose views are based on a respect for the facts,
whether they are in favour of the UK’s policy or not, the significance of the position
of China (and India) is no longer a controversial issue. In the reported words of Professor
Corinne Le Que´re´, lead author of the Global Carbon Budget and Director of the Tyndall
Centre for Climate Change Research, ‘carbon savings by other countries will make little
difference unless they are matched by the world’s most populous nation’ (Webster,
2013).6 It therefore cannot be a matter of rational dispute that the UK’s policy should
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be formulated on the basis of appropriate weight having been given to the grave problem
China (and India) pose. But this is exactly what has happened. The significance of this
problem has been systematically underestimated by the CCC, and its...
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