I grew up surrounded by tips, a few miles from a place called Aberfan. My grandfather was a mining engineer. My mother was expecting me when the Aberfan disaster happened. And Edmund Davies, who chaired the subsequent inquiry, was a family friend.
The Aberfan disaster in 1966 killed 116 children and 28 adults. Had the engineers and authorities known of the danger, the public would have had a right to expect the authorities to act to prevent the deaths.
But the reality was that the National Coal Board (NCB) did know. It knew about the springs under the tip which made it inherently unsafe – they appeared on the Ordnance Survey maps!
The subsequent tribunal of inquiry found that, despite the lack of legislation on the safety of coal tips, the NCB’s legal liability was “incontestable and uncontested” – despite the NCB having wasted 76 days doing exactly that when, in fact, it had privately accepted liability before the inquiry even began.
Like a tip with a spring beneath it, our entire economic system is built on fossil fuels. And, like the NCB, governments have been aware of the science for years.
Like the NCB, the energy companies have denied liability and now we are at the point where we look up and see that whole mountain starting to move.
The question is surely not “can we afford to address climate change?” but “can we afford not to?”
The UK government likes to boast of its progress in reducing emissions but in reality it has done very little. Too often, the UK appears to lack ambition or even to be going in the wrong direction.
So, while Copenhagen intends to be the first carbon-neutral world capital by 2025, the UK’s target for net zero emissions remains at 2050 – even though the science tells us that’s simply too late.
Too often there is a gulf between targets and their implementation. As the Committee on Climate Change has noted, since June 2018 the UK government has delivered only one of 25 critical emissions reduction policies.
How much more could we have achieved by now if the government were serious about reducing emissions?
We know what needs to be done. The LGA with Ashden and Friends of the Earth has drawn up a list of 31 recommendations for local authorities, all but two of which require up-front funding.
On housing stock, the Scottish government offers interest-free loans for homeowners wanting to make their homes more energy efficient. Westminster does not.
Even the incentives that Westminster has offered are gradually being eroded. The Renewable Heat Incentive – which encourages householders, communities, businesses and the public sector to use renewable heat technologies – has only been confirmed until 31 March 2021 so how does the government intend to encourage low-carbon heating after that?
In Brighton, the new ground source heat pump at Elwyn Jones Court should benefit from this funding (provided it is commissioned in time). But the removal of this incentive means we will have to look elsewhere for funding for other projects.
It is a similar story for solar panels, with feed-in tariffs plummeting to less than a tenth of what they were ten years ago.
The latest victim is building regulations. The London Energy Transformation Initiative, a group of leading architects and engineers, is warning that proposed changes to the building regulations in England are likely to make buildings less energy efficient, not more.
They describe the changes as “a step backwards in a climate where we need a huge leap forward”.
We also need the government to be transparent about its emissions rather than taking them “off its books” by offshoring them to China.
According to the Office for National Statistics’ Economic Review published in October 2019, China is the largest source of the UK’s embedded emissions from its imported goods and services.
To have a true idea of the UK’s emissions, we have to include all its “offshore” emissions, including those from aviation and shipping.
And the government certainly needs to end public funding for overseas fossil-fuel projects. Government agency UK Export Finance was recently exposed as funding overseas fossil-fuel projects which will together emit 69 million tonnes of carbon a year – roughly equivalent to a sixth of the UK’s carbon emissions.
We need to address the underlying causes of climate change with the same urgency as we treat its effects – the bush fires in Australia, the floods in Indonesia and last year in India and rising sea levels. People left to the mercy of our failure to act deserve – and need – prevention to come first.
Of course, the UK is not going to solve climate change on its own. As we withdraw from the EU with little guarantee over environmental protections, the government should remember that the climate is a global challenge requiring collective action.
But the UK can take a lead in such action. This has the potential to help our economy, restore our standing in international affairs post-Brexit and help protect us and people around the world against the impacts of climate change.
Councils must demand more of the government. And the government must act. Otherwise, history may regard its culpability as “incontestable and uncontested”.
Siriol Hugh-Jones is a Green member of Brighton and Hove City Council.
