That I fully expect to be dead by the time the UK achieves net zero is, of course, no reason to dodge interim advice from the Climate Change Committee (CCC), the UK’s official climate authority. Its latest report to government is of particular interest to the public, in arguing that a third of the emissions cuts required to achieve net zero by 2050 will have to come from consumers themselves.
Unless we – individual households – accept heat pumps and electric cars and deterrents to flying and less meat (skipping two kebabs per week), the CCC explains, the target cannot be met. And assuming the introduction of a selective news blackout that reduces public awareness of UK plutocrats, celebrities and influencers with colossal carbon footprints, such a behavioural transformation may not be impossible.
In the more likely event of continued media indulgence for the UK’s highest-status emitters, sustained general cooperation may be more optimistic.
For as long as, say, Carrie Johnson sees no reason not to disseminate images of her family’s strenuous holidaymaking in distant places – last month Saudi Arabia – the much less frequent flyers being urged by the CCC to adapt to net zero will be exposed to powerfully contradictory, even compliance-crushing, messages. Including, in this case, that a “dream” stay in Saudi’s St Regis Red Sea resort – accessible only by seaplane or speedboat – is compatible with a reputation as an environmentalist. Just a few years ago, Mrs Johnson was extremely exercised by single-use straws. Saudi Arabia’s actions to combat climate change, to which it is exceptionally exposed, were recently rated as “critically insufficient”.
To be fair, as Mrs Johnson pointed out, her husband was already in Saudi Arabia for what the couple call “work”. As in, he was telling an audience that Saudi Arabia is “a global leader in women’s empowerment and innovation”.
The CCC sets great store in its new report on comments from a small citizens’ panel that heard from experts before it appraised different household interventions and their funding. According to its chief executive, Emma Pinchbeck, these 26 people “were often ahead of even our advice on some of the things they were willing to consider”. Without seeing the presentation, we can’t know if it featured fairness, the carbon footprint from transport by the richest 0.1% that is 22 times that of a low earner, or if funding options featured the proposal of many prominent campaigners, notably Oxfam, that disproportionate emissions be reflected in policy or taxes. After a different panel, the UK-based Cambridge Sustainability Commission on Scaling Behaviour Change, convened a few years ago, Prof Peter Newell of Sussex University said: “We have got to cut overconsumption and the best place to start is overconsumption among the polluting elites who contribute by far more than their share of carbon emissions.”
The CCC records the panel’s interest in subsidies to help poorer consumers survive the transition to heat pumps, but there is no sign that the 26 people considered ways of making the wealthiest emitters pay, let alone of making them, too, adapt. Aside from noting the panel’s support for a frequent flyer levy (as an alternative to generally increased fares), the resulting CCC advice seems to perpetuate the latitude long extended to the drivers of SUVs and the owners of multiple homes, in suggesting that the behaviour of a polluting elite is situated somewhere beyond targeted penalties.
Even so, as public understanding develops, more flamboyant polluters in this group may want to think harder about showing off their car collections, yachts, multiple homes, commutes to Dubai. As generous as it is of the Beckhams, for instance, to share photos of their family’s scattered houses, travels and £16m yacht, success in educating the public (on which the CCC proposals depend) on carbon emissions could raise the chances of this gifted family being perceived, above all, as creators of carbon emissions. Already, although it has yet to trouble his career in underpants, David Beckham has been identified as one of the highest-emission environmentalists on the planet.
For the present, research indicates that the public still underestimates, to a degree hugely convenient to the richest groups, their contribution to global warming. The majority of respondents in a four-country study overestimated the carbon footprint of the poorest 50%, and underestimated those of the richest 10% and 1%. One of its authors, Dr Ramit Debnath, commented: “These countries are very different, but we found the rich are pretty similar no matter where you go, and their concerns are different to the rest of society. There’s a huge contrast between billionaires travelling by private jet while the rest of us drink with soggy paper straws: one of those activities has a big impact on an individual carbon footprint, and one doesn’t.”
Considering how little it attempts to challenge this agreeable state of affairs, the CCC’s report surely deserved a warmer reception than it received from the high net worth community and its allies. At the Telegraph, for example, we find that, far from exulting that the advisers did not get it into their heads to extract funding from the worst polluting households, its correspondents are incensed by “everything Labour’s net zero advisers want you to give up” and the prospect of state subsidies for low-income families switching to low-carbon technologies.
Still less has there been recognition that for affluent high-emitters the early adoption of new low-carbon technology would put them among the first to benefit from reduced running costs that form part of the CCC’s plan. The panel, we learn, “viewed it as inevitable and acceptable that higher-income households often make bigger savings overall”.
Meanwhile, their SUVs are safe, they don’t eat kebabs or use trains, and carbon emissions remain, for the foreseeable, the most negligible of deterrents to a “dream” family trip to Saudi Arabia. Win-win-win!
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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