ABSTRACT
Introduction The UK’s engagement with the issue of climate change has been rather paradoxical. On the one hand it has been widely regarded as a global leader, both in terms of its international diplomatic effort and its domestic performance on greenhouse gas emission (GHGE) reduction (IEEP 2006). The UK reached its effort-sharing target under the EU’s Kyoto Protocol emission reduction commitment ahead of schedule, and went on to over-deliver – one of only a handful of EU-15 member states to do so (EEA 2013). To help achieve this, it deployed several innovative policy instruments, such as emissions trading. Internationally, the UK has shown entrepreneurial leadership, principally during the Rio and Kyoto climate summits, and when chairing the G8 and acting in its Presidency of the EU. The celebrated Stern Review of the economics of climate change (Stern 2006) and decades of scientific research offer evidence of cognitive leadership. With the adoption of the 2008 Climate Change Act, the UK was widely lauded as the first country to enshrine in law carbon emission reduction targets – of up to 80 per cent by 2050 – with a view to removing policy from the vagaries of the issue attention cycle. The same Act also heralded wide-reaching five-yearly climate change risk assessments, to inform a rolling national programme of adaptation to climate impacts, confirming the UK as a leader in that domain as well. And yet the emission reductions achieved during the 1990s were to a large extent a fortuitous by-product of unrelated energy policy reforms (Kerr 2007). In the 2000s, CO2 emissions started to rise again, and a unilateral 1997 commitment to reduce them by 20 per cent by 2010 was quietly dropped. Moreover, it is questionable whether any politician in the UK has fully grasped the enormity of the challenge of radically decarbonising the national energy system in just over a generation, widely regarded as necessary to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Finally, the UK remains in many respects ‘critically unprepared’ to adapt to predicted climate impacts (EAC 2015). In this chapter we outline the history of the UK’s response to climate change, tracing the waxing and waning of leadership in the face of vested interests, economic and financial pressures, concerns over energy security and, latterly, a
growing degree of ‘luke-warmism’ over the seriousness of the problem (Ridley 2015). The overall story is one of repeated attempts by policy entrepreneurs in governments of both right and left to ‘join-up’ government to deliver deeper emission cuts, but a rather piecemeal and often incoherent introduction of new policy instruments. In other words, the ability of governments to lead a lowcarbon transition has been rather more fitful and halting than the UK’s international reputation might suggest.
