Cornwall Council and the climate emergency

Following Cornwall Councillors’ recognition of a climate emergency back in January the Council has begun work on its ‘Climate Change Programme Plan’, preparing a report for Cabinet due in late July. Tomorrow, a report on progress is being discussed at the Council’s Neighbourhoods Overview and Scrutiny Committee where members will note it and help identify how Cornwall can become carbon neutral by 2030

Council officers clearly haven’t been idle since January. They’ve come up with an approach that contains a ‘discovery’ phase followed by a ‘define’ phase and established a framework for delivery. The report also includes some preliminary data.

What is the precise challenge the Council faces? Let’s look at the position as recorded by the UK Government’s ‘Local authority CO2 emissions estimates 2005-16’. This only includes CO2, as do the Council’s figures. Carbon dioxide contributes around 80% of greenhouse gases. (Although the overall headline figures in the Council’s interim report look similar there are some unexplained differences between Council and Government data. Moreover, the presentation of the Council’s data in bar chart form does not make for easy or direct comparison with the actual numbers in the Government dataset.)

What are central and local government telling us? First, the good news. In Cornwall CO2 emissions fell from around 4,200 kilotons a year in 2006 to 3,000 in 2016, a near 30% fall in a decade. This is movement in the right direction.

However, we have to factor in three bits of bad news.

First, the maths. While the fall in ten years looks impressive, in order to achieve zero emissions by 2030 that rate of change has to speed up. On current trends even assuming the absolute fall in CO2 emissions can be maintained, we’re on track for zero emissions no earlier than the early 2040s. Even this will require a rising proportional decline each and every year, which looks a lot more challenging, just in terms of the maths.

Speeding up the rate of decline of CO2 emissions seems over-optimistic in the light of the second piece of bad news. The low-hanging fruit has already been plucked. Almost all of the fall in CO2 emissions in the past decade came from two sectors, industry and domestic. This was caused by a switch to renewable energy sources and more efficient heating of houses. Conservative Government policy has now jammed the brakes on the switch to renewables.

Third, there a number of elephants in the room about which at this stage the Council’s interim report chooses to be rather coy. The first, and most troubling, is the Council’s own obsession with hyper-housing and population growth. This is akin to trying to put out a fire with petrol. The report admits that another 44,000 houses by 2030 (houses it mysteriously prefers to describe as ‘Cornish homes’) will add another 25 kilotons of CO2 a year. It also notes that new houses are still being built with an EPC rating of only C.

Meanwhile, carbon emissions from road transport have hardly fallen at all in the last decade (just 4%). This is now the biggest greenhouse gas producing sector. Only Cornwall Council planners and councillors can seriously believe that all those extra people will walk and cycle everywhere.

And some elephants are completely invisible. For example, emissions from aviation are not included at all in the official figures at either level. In fact, as I have already shown, emissions from flights to and from Newquay airport have grown around four-fold in the past decade to 55-60 kilotons a year. While this is from a low base its growth is also exponential. It’s more worrying that Cornwall Council has not been bothering to collect data on the greenhouse gasses emitted from its own airport and claims to have no forecasts for future growth.

These rather major caveats aside, the Council has made a promising start to its climate emergency plan. The difficulties arise when it begins to identify the radical actions needed and councillors and other local elites wake up to what the implications are. The necessary remedies require a major re-think of the Council’s own growth strategy. But will the Council’s leadership be capable of doing that?