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Not so long ago, the UK government could brag about its climate credentials. In 2019, Prime Minister Theresa May pledged the country to reach net zero by 2050—the first major economy to legally commit to eradicating its emissions. The UK’s early embrace of renewables also saw it cut emissions more quickly and rapidly than other major economies, and it has now slashed its emissions in half compared with 1990 levels.
But as of late, the UK’s bragging rights are looking shaky. Under current prime minister Rishi Sunak, the government has signaled a willingness to roll back green pledges and drag climate policy into the culture wars. In its latest report to Parliament, the Climate Change Committee, which advises the government on climate policy, warned that the UK was in danger of losing its position as a climate leader.
For six years, Chris Stark has been CEO of the Climate Change Committee and the UK’s top adviser on climate change. As he steps down from the role, he spoke to WIRED about the UK’s shift away from climate leadership, his fears about the polarization around climate change, and the role he thinks oil and gas companies might play in a net zero future.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Matt Reynolds: In the six years you’ve been CEO of the Climate Change Committee, the UK has had four different prime ministers. How much does the person in charge matter when it comes to climate change policy?
Chris Stark: It’s massively important, though it’s often not the explicit leadership that matters. To tackle climate change we’ve got to have something that spreads right across all the arms of the government.If you know that the person at the top of government wants that policy to be focused on climate, everything just gets a bit easier. I imagine this as a set of strings held by the person at the top. It’s much easier if they’re pulling them up.
So if you’re working on housing policy and there’s something at the margins about whether you do something that helps emissions, or you do something that helps one of the other priorities, then knowing that the boss wants progress on climate really matters.
Has government enthusiasm for bold climate policy waned since your early days in the job?
Over my six years I think we’ve made a huge amount of progress, but I feel we’ve lost the excitement at the top to do good climate policy. In the first half of my time with the CCC we were producing, I think, really interesting insights on what a net zero future looks like, which were easily swallowed by a government that was interested in carving a more positive future.
Today it’s much more of a culture war, and net zero is presented—including by the prime minister—as a cost more than an opportunity. All the things we said before are still true, even more so than six years ago, but we find ourselves having to make the same arguments with one hand tied behind our back.
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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine feels like a really pivotal moment in this narrative. In the autumn of 2022, energy prices in the UK were skyrocketing, and yet the response of Liz Truss, prime minister at the time, was to double down on oil and gas exploration and refuse to ask people to cut down their energy usage. It was the absolute opposite approach to many European nations facing the same problem.
At the time [the invasion] happened, it was obviously a genuine crisis and I thought climate was going to come down the priority list. But in my technocratic mind, I was also thinking this was going to create the incentive to get off high-carbon fuels—if you want to know what the world looks like with a high carbon price, we’re about to find out.
What I didn’t expect is that the green arguments were too late out of the blocks because the fossil arguments stepped in immediately to say, “This is why we need a domestic fossil fuel supply.” That really important argument, to act on this because fossil fuels are so price-volatile and so expensive, was slightly missed in the political ether at the time, and we jumped to a different narrative of what the country needed to do.
The irony of that whole period is we’re running out of oil and gas. So it’s not going to be a credible strategy in the long run to try and pump prime oil and gas licenses in the North Sea.
A year later, Truss’ successor, Rishi Sunak, made a big speech rolling back key climate policies, most notably pushing back the 2030 deadline banning the sale of new petrol and diesel cars.
If you look at it purely as a policy speech, there was more pro-climate policy than there was delayed climate policy. It was the one where he talks about accelerating green investment, for example. And the electric vehicle thing [pushing back the 2030 deadline] wasn’t that much of a shift, since we were already allowing hybrids until 2035.
But what did the country hear? They heard, “Don’t worry, now’s not the time to switch to electric vehicles.” It’s hard to tie anything back to a single speech, but if you look at the share of electric vehicles being sold in the UK, it has flatlined since September. I’m sure there are other factors here, but there will be people who thought, “Oh well, maybe I don’t need to get that electric car right now.”
It seems that this government has decided to make appealing to motorists a key campaigning strategy. In July 2023, the Labour Party narrowly lost the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election, and a lot of commentators thought that the Conservative candidate won that election because of his opposition to the Ultra Low Emission Zone.
What happened there was interesting. The Labour Party also accepted the narrative that ULEZ was why they didn’t win that constituency. Inevitably, in any election there are a host of issues at play, but if all parties think it’s about environmental policies, it’s no surprise that that becomes one of the dominant themes in politics after that.
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My regret is that we’ve allowed that to color the whole of climate policymaking and politics, but it’s important to make that distinction between politics and policy because the government is still producing lots and lots of climate policies, but now it’s quite unsure how to pitch them.
Electric vehicles are a good example of an area where the UK could have moved really early and made itself a real hub for this technology. Instead, we have a situation where China is really dominating that market and reaping a lot of the benefits of that green transition.
You go right back to the Beijing Olympics—right back at that point, they were already planning as an autocratic state for a full supply chain of electric vehicles, and they weren’t interested in fossil fuels, it was solely about electric vehicles. They could see the trajectory for cost falls in batteries, see the opportunity for being the dominant player in that market, and see that the production line itself is cheaper for an electric vehicle.
We could have done that in the West. Instead we had a whole King Canute-style strategy of holding back from electric vehicles, and we’re about to see the first wave of much, much cheaper electric vehicles from China. It’s going to be difficult to hold that back, so you’ve got a real challenge now.
You don’t need to be an autocratic state to be successful in this transition. I wish we were better at accepting that technology falls down that cost curve.
In February the government announced that the UK is the first major economy to have halved its emissions, compared with 1990 levels. The transition really has been huge, but the CCC has shown that the vast majority of that reduction has come from decarbonizing the power sector. Progress on transport, buildings, industry, and so on has been much slower.
This is the source of some tension between us and the government. I think it’s remarkable what we’ve pulled off with the power sector in this country. It is genuine emissions reduction, there’s been a hell of a lot of big policy to allow that to happen, and a whole energy sector that’s been dragged along with that.
However, while I understand the government’s desire to give retrospective arguments for this, it doesn’t matter in terms of climate. What climate cares about is what you do next, and that’s where I’ve seen the biggest gap. I’m interested now in the set of other stories that go alongside the power system.
We’ve got to change our transport system, change the way industrial production takes place; we’ve got to do things in farming, and heat homes differently. These are the next set of stories and we’re slow on them.
We are not really reducing emissions outside of the power sector at the same rate as inside it. We have to see a very significant increase in decarbonization outside the power sector if we want to hit the goals we’ve set for 2030 and beyond.
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One area the UK has been trying to get ahead is with capturing carbon and storing it in the North Sea, the same place where companies are currently drilling for oil and gas.
It’s a controversial thing for us, because obviously I’d prefer that we didn’t continue to use fossil fuels.
But the role of carbon capture is really important in achieving net zero. It helps you reduce emissions on the journey to net zero, and if you’ve got the facility to capture carbon and store it, it also opens this brand-new industry of greenhouse gas removals, which I think the world will need on its journey to tackling climate change.
Without carbon capture and storage it is a very difficult journey to net zero, if not impossible. Without it, it is a very difficult journey. And the key thing is that it’s not an alternative to decarbonizing.
The UK government has awarded 21 carbon storage licenses, most of them going to the oil and gas industry. It’s jarring that the same companies that dug carbon out of the ground, sparking off this whole crisis, stand to benefit by putting that carbon back under the sea.
It jars with me as well, but I also care about pace and tech and ability. You will not find the ability to do this outside of the oil and gas sector. If you want to try and exclude the oil and gas sector from this then you will fail on this.
We cannot be too binary about who we deal with. It is a transition. Oil and gas do have a role, whether we like it or not, over the next 30 years. I’d far rather have an oil and gas sector that is properly invested in technologies that will help the transition to net zero. If we make them pariahs then they’ll stick to their knitting, as we’ve seen in Scotland.
In an interview with the BBC you said that climate campaigners have been unhelpful in the discussion around climate change. I’m sure a lot of people will be disappointed to hear that from the UK’s leading climate adviser.
Yeah, I’m sure they’d be disappointed. I have no issue with campaigners themselves. My observation is more about the impact that campaigning has had and how that’s changed over the time I’ve done this job.
I would contrast the early part of my job—as we were gearing up to do the early work on net zero, where there was just a positive campaign to act on climate change that made it quite easy for us to do the analysis and present that to a government that was ready for it—with the recent discussion, which I think has been more polarized by some of the more extreme activism.
I’m not judging at all. I understand entirely why activists feel as strongly as they do about climate change. I also feel that strongly. But I do think the politics has soured partly because of what the activist groups have done recently. I don’t know whether that’s right or wrong, except to say that I think it’s objectively what we’re seeing in British politics at the moment.
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When you say activism, are you thinking about Just Stop Oil, blocking motorways, and so on?
I don’t think it’s just Just Stop Oil, but yeah, those more radical protests. It’s an easy target now for the populist voices to say, “This is what happens if we try and tackle climate change.”
I know there are activists that are keen to return to that more positive framing. My own view is that the more we keep the arguments for climate change positive, the better that progress will be.
Right, but I suppose another way to look at it is that without those climate activists, it gives others the license to ease off on the transition because there isn’t that pressure.
It may well be right. But my point is that I don’t think we need to dial up the risk now. I think people see it. Climate change is definitely with us and people are worried about it—in a sense, the climate is doing that job for us.
The despair comes in when you are worried about climate change, you’re seeing it playing out, and you’re not seeing a response from industry. My worry is that’s where we’ll end up.
You’re right that the positive framing needs to be complemented by a genuine sense of the risks, but I tend to think that people already see that. Not everyone wakes up like I do and thinks about climate change, but everyone is touched by it now. I don’t have any trouble making the arguments that climate change is happening now—that feels like a shift over the past six years.
