The man who showed that black holes give off radiation, now known as Hawking radiation, has died – 55 years after doctors told him he had two years left to live. According to fellow physicist Max Tegmark, having been told he would die young made Stephen Hawking push for actions that would ensure that humanity did not. That may be why he was one of the founding members of the Climate Leadership Council, an organisation pushing for the same thing as us, a carbon fee and dividend, a rational and fair way of cutting emissions and thereby ensuring that humanity fulfils its potential the way Hawking fulfilled his.

He wasn’t afraid to tackle the big issues, and not just those of physics. In has later years he was quite outspoken about the existential threats our species faces.

Climate change is one of the great dangers we face, and it’s one we can prevent if we act now

Most of us aren’t very good at facing existential threats, and our politics, geared as it is to 5 year (or less) electoral cycles and 24 hour news cycles (news of Hawking’s death is already old news) is even worse. As Chris Donaldson wrote on this site a few months ago

Ultimately, humans simply don’t have the mental energy to deal with this abstract, future threat

Well, as Hawking showed, some humans do, but dealing with the threat is more than just appreciating that it is a threat, dealing with it means coming up with solutions that can realistically tackle it. We need to think like scientists, and see climate change as a problem which has a solution.

Another great scientist, perhaps the greatest climate scientist around, is James Hansen, the man who brought climate change to the world’s attention with his testimony to the US Congress in 1988, has also been unafraid to deal with the existential crisis facing us and is also a supporter of fee and dividend as a key solution, one that can attract support from across the political spectrum. James Hansen, who is on Citizens’ Climate Lobby’s advisory board, once said

If you want to join the fight to save the planet, to save creation for your grandchildren, there is no more effective step you could take than becoming an active member of this group.

It’s hard to ignore the views of such great minds, of people who have thought long and hard about a problem that most of us push to the backs of our minds as we get on with our lives.

Richard Dawkins tweeted this line from Wordsworth:

Silent face, the marble index of a mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.

He was writing about Newton, but could equally well have been referring to Hawking. And yet, though he could only speak through a computer, he was far from silent.

Their report, published in January, finds that:

• The Government has made a strong commitment to achieving the UK’s climate change targets.
• Policies and proposals set out in the Clean Growth Strategy will need to be firmed up.
• Gaps to meeting the fourth and fifth carbon budgets remain. These gaps must be closed.
• Risks of under-delivery must be addressed and carbon budgets met on time.

This is the committee’s own summary of its report. The Committee on Climate Change, or CCC (not to be confused with CCL), is an independent, statutory body established under the Climate Change Act 2008. They advise government on emissions reductions targets and report to Parliament on progress made.

The report is 84 pages long, and if you fancy reading it, here it is:

It didn’t receive that much coverage in the media, but it did get some. The Telegraph’s headline was

Government clean growth plan ‘falls short’ on climate targets

and they go on to say

Adrian Gault, the head of the CCC, said new policies need to emerge later this year, and be in place by 2020, to avoid a climate policy cliff edge.

As we reported last October, there’s a risk that without a robust and strong carbon price, coal could make a resurgence. The Government has pledged to phase out coal by 2025, but the strengthening of the UK’s carbon tax didn’t materialise in last November’s budget. Instead, Philip Hammond said the carbon price would remain at its current level of £18 per tonne. When the tax was introduced back in 2013 the idea was that it would rise to £30 per tonne by 2020 and £70 by 2030, but in 2014 George Osborne decided to freeze it at £18 until 2020. Hammond’s statement implies an extension of this freeze until 2025.

The report notes that the Government’s strategy relies heavily on imports of electricity from other European countries.

Imports of electricity to the UK have increased in recent years, largely due to the UK’s carbon price floor (currently £18/tCO2) having increased wholesale electricity prices in the UK, relative to other European countries. EU fossil-fired plants do not face this extra carbon price, and are not charged certain network costs that UK generators face, though they do incur charges for using interconnectors

Since much of this imported electricity is and will continue to be generated by fossil fuels, the UK’s emissions reductions could lead to higher emissions elsewhere in Europe, and since we all share the same atmosphere, carbon emissions are carbon emissions. The climate doesn’t care where they come from. Even if we were only to import electricity generated from low-carbon sources, this could still result in higher emissions in other countries.

For imports to be genuinely low-carbon they would need to come from surplus low-carbon generation.

The report mentions Professor Dieter Helm’s independent Cost of Energy Review, saying they have previously endorsed his call for an economy-wide carbon price, and whilst they’re critical of the complexity of the UK energy market, they say that the Capacity Market and CfD (Contracts for Difference) schemes are now well known to developers and provide them with some security, whereas

Replacing long-term contracts with an increased carbon price … is unlikely to provide a bankable revenue stream for low-carbon investors (the ‘Carbon Price Floor’, for example, was frozen one year after it was introduced). This would risk increasing the cost of capital to investors, raising the overall cost of procuring low-carbon generation.

but

genuine markets for long-term contracts for low-carbon generation are insufficient to support the scale of decarbonisation required by the UK’s carbon targets.

An escalating carbon price, as called for by Dieter Helm, CCL and others, and as the Carbon Price Floor was envisaged when introduced by George Osborne, is vulnerable to changes in government or to the whims of governments whereas a legally binding contract provides a greater degree of certainty.

However, they state that existing policies and proposals are not enough for us to hit our targets
That red bit is the gap that needs to be filled.

CCC Chairman, Lord Deben, said

The Clean Growth Strategy is ambitious in its aims to build a thriving low-carbon Britain but ambitions alone are not enough. As it stands, the Strategy does not deliver enough action to meet the UK’s emissions targets in the 2020s and 2030s. The Government’s policies and proposals will need to be firmed up as a matter of urgency – and supplemented with additional measures – if the UK is to deliver on its legal commitments and secure its position as an international climate change leader.