On 7 October, Lord Turner, chairman of the Committee on Climate Change, wrote to Ed Miliband, the cabinet minister heading the new UK Department of Energy & Climate Change, with interim advice.   The CCC is being established as an independent body to provide expert analysis and advice on how the UK can meet its climate change goals. It is responsible for advising on the UK’s carbon budgets for the period to 2050, and for reporting on progress in reducing emissions to meet these budgets. The CCC is the first body of its kind in the world and is being set up under the Climate Change Bill.

The Committee now advises that the UK should reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% below 1990 levels by 2050, and that this target should include international aviation and shipping.  Previously the target that had been envisaged was a 60% reduction excluding aviation and shipping.   The proposed increase reflects growing concern about dangerous climate change, based on advances in understanding through research and climate modelling.   The Committee believes that it would be difficult to envisage the outcome of global negotiations which allowed the developed countries to have emissions per capita which are significantly above a global sustainable average – this would require a cut of 80% for the UK.

As I noted in my blog of 28 August, the Department for Transport has estimated that, on present projections, aviation’s contribution would amount to 30% of the UK’s overall emissions by 2050, assuming that other sectors achieved the then planned reduction of  60%.  If, as proposed by the CCC, an 80% reduction is needed, aviation’s share would be 60% of the total, which seems unfeasibly large.   There must be a serious question about the long-term viability of a third runway at Heathrow airport.