Key quotes&notes from the webinar with Jonathan Porritt (Co-founder of Forum for the Future) Webinar for The Crowd’s Green Recovery Festival

2020 has been pretty amazing when it comes to companies making climate commitments, and the pandemic has not slowed the commitment, and perhaps enhanced it. I think these commitments are for real, there’s not an awful lot of greenwashing (Shell aside). There was a time when gov used to be able to point to the opposition and obstructionism of business to this agenda as a reason for not doing anything, but that has gone pretty much entirely. So why is it that yesterday when Johnson announced his 10 pt plan we end up with this dogs dinner…? 

Johnson’s 10 point plan – the Good stuff

• a date to phase out petrol & Diesel engines – puts the UK in the leadership cohort of countries seeking to move as fast as poss 
• 40GW of offshore wind
• £2bn fo EV infrastructure 
• combined with money gov has made available on active travel fund (improve public transport, facilities for pedestrians and cyclists) and it’s a viable proposition – as good as anything you can expect 

But that’s it. Everything else is a mishmash of half hearted and half thought through ideas, some things are going backwards

The bad stuff...

• ‘Energy efficiency’ is going backwards not forwards. When green homes grant launched they claimed it make 140,000 new jobs by April next year. Boris’ latest opinion is that it will create 50,000 by April and announcement for one extra year for £1bn. This is so inadequate it’s hard to know where to start, particularly as the conservative manifesto committed £9bn on getting to grips with housing. 
• £500m for green Hydrogen. Half the amount of money for green hydrogen is just a smoke screen, things like “a hydrogen village” don’t mean anything at all. It just so happens I know a little bit about this because the university is looking into using H2 in a gas grid, and it’s a pipe dream. And anyway green H2 must go to shipping and steel. It’s a paltry sum of money anyway, France and Germany have committed €7bn over next decade 
• Carbon storage. If you’re really kind you can stack the investment to €1bn, which was first promised more than a decade ago, then again 7 years ago, and then 3 years ago
• Nature commitment: 30,000 hectares of trees planted – but no action plan, no detailed planning, and absolutely no reference to the fact that the one thing that would make a real change to the UK which is to stop all further burning of our peatlands, because incumbent interests wouldn’t like it. If you’re still in hock w ppl that think shouting grouse is just the acme of civilised behaviour, you’re not going to take too kindly to a gov that wants to burn your grouse moors. I’m being harsh deliberately because I can’t believe how complimentary others have been about this
• No mention of solar, which we’re actually doing brilliantly well at. Yesterday we had a couple of announcements from companies that are going for their own generation of solar power to deliver their net-zero commitments 
• No mention of what we need to do with agriculture and food production! We need to move towards a predominantly plant-based economy

This is from a gov completely incoherent of what combination of short, medium and long term planning would actually look like. It in no way puts us on a trajectory to a halving of emissions by 2030, and in no way constitutes a proper leadership opposition. So inevitably – significant disappointment 

We need to keep up the business pressure on this, progressive companies who are seized by the full challenge of what net-zero by X looks like, and taking it seriously through science-based targets, action-planning, and hard-edged measures to get those emissions down. And we need increasingly political pressure from campaigners, much more civil disobedience from young campaigners.

The story for me is to see how quickly young activist’s campaigns eg school strikes will bounce back in 2021. My warning is that you may not have cottoned on to the true extent of an emerging cry of intergenerational rage as more and more young people understand the true extent of how we have undermined their prospects for a good future. You should anticipate that the anger will intensify and the numbers of people sharing that anger will grow every year.  How can we leverage (the rage of) our youth in Folkestone to add to CUSTOM vision?

We’ve got a long way to go, and although I’ve sought to remain hopeful about the ability of our politicians to seize this moment (pandemic) to narrow the gap between what the science tells us about accelerating climate change and where we are politically, maintaining hope in that space isn’t easy given the continuing reluctance of most politicians. 

The Committee on Climate Change – I feel for them because they’re an independent body but they can’t be too nasty because otherwise ministers get the hump and don’t listen to them as much as we need them to!

Companies must not rely on big grandstanding target declarations as a substitute for action, just go ahead and work towards halving your emissions for 2030. It’s much harder for SMEs. We ask our large biz partners what they’re doing to make it easier for their supply chain partners to meet targets. Maybe we can explore what SMEs in Folkestone are doing to meet targets and support them to reach up their supply chain for support from their larger corporate partners?

I can be a bit less mean about Gov on aviation! The JetZero council is good, and it’s proving useful!  Aviation won’t be back to 6%per annum growth in 2021, so this is an industry that needs to think very carefully about how they’re going to build trust with consumers. Gov could impose all sorts of conditions when they bail them out! 

If I were Rishi Sunak I’d be having a lively discussion about carbon taxing, to start phasing it in now while everyone understands we need to meet 2030 targets, just as we phase out the internal combustion engine 

Recent Book: Hope in Hell