Saturday evening and I listened to Lord Turner of Eechinswell, the Chair of the Committee on Climate Change. This committee has just been created by the Climate Change Bill to define a carbon budget and advise on policies that could deliver said budgets. Turner was answering questions from a select committee. In his comments (on how the UK will reduce CO2 by 80% by 2050) he assumed land transport would become de-carbonised and that electricity would be generated sustainably by the middle of the century and that this could be done at a cost easily borne by the UK (he quoted from the Stern Review). But he also stated that if carbon capture does not become a reality within 15 years, then coal-burning will take CO2 towards and beyond 550ppm, and temperatures of +4degrees C and beyond. Temperature increases of this scale are likely to engender a range of positive feedbacks such as the release of methane from melting tundra and do for human civilization.
Turners comments were authoritative (and after all, if he doesn’t know what he’s talking about it is unlikely he would have been given his job!). I can see the UK meeting targets for de-carbonising our electricity supply. The electricride project is one small contribution towards the electrification of transport. But carbon-capture at a commercial scale within a decade is really going to push our technological, economic and political systems.
