This is for a number of reasons, including the basic problem of cost (although £1-2 billion for a technology that may save the planet and create a major industry for the UK doesn’t seem that much) and public acceptance. But as I am currently reading Catherine Mitchell’s excellent book on the Political Economy of Sustainable Energy, another dimension of the problem also strikes me.

Catherine’s analysis of the UK energy system, and the underlying reason for its inability to handle system change, is that it is managed within a “regulatory state” paradigm. She takes this concept from Michael Moran, who developed it to describe the way the state developed under Thatcherism and following privatisation (a process also picked up on by Dieter Helm, as I blogged on recently). the point about Britain’s regulatory state is that it has come to manage sectors of the economy like energy through arms length regulation. This has worked reasonably well for containing costs through sweating assets, but less well for maintaining investment and absolutely not well for innovation, especially in areas (like CCS, but also including smart grids or even offshore wind) where costs are not really known by the private sector itself.

To be more effective on an issue like CCS, requiring coordination and working more closely with the private sector to discover costs, a different kind of state is required, following a different type of policy. Such an approach has been described by Harvard economist Dani Rodrik, based on his observation of successful industrial policy (which he argues is simply a version of innovation policy) around the world. As he puts it:

“…the right way of thinking about industrial policy is as a discovery process – one where firms and governments learn about underlying costs and opportunities and engage in strategic coordination. The traditional arguments against industrial policy lose much of their force when we view industrial policy in these terms. For example, the typical riposte about government’s inability to pick winners becomes irrelevant. yes, the government has imperfect information, but…so does the private sector. It is the information externalities generated by ignorance in the private sector that creates a useful public role-even when the public sector has worse information than the private sector.”

Crucially, this kind of problem requires a different relationship between public and private sectors:

“Similarly, the idea that governments need to keep private firms at arm’s length to minimize corruption and rent-seeking gets turned on its head. Yes, the government needs to maintain its autonomy from private interests. But it can elicit useful information from the private sector only when it is engaged in an ongoing relationship with it.”

This, of course, is precisely what the regulatory state model can’t do, and is why it has found it so hard to generate innovation in the energy sector (where the private sector does not do on its own). This is true not only in CCS but also in smart grids, where a similar arm’s-length competition (the Low Carbon Network Fund) has been awkwardly placed within a regulator (Ofgem) whose historical remit and culture has been about keeping prices low, not stimulating innovation.

This is not to say that a regulatory state might not get there in the end, more to say that the sense in which the UK’s institutions governing energy are not aligned for innovation goes very deep. Which is just the theme of Mitchell’s book.

The bigger picture is that the salience of climate change for the US and UK publics has been declining from a high point in around 2007. But at the same time, there is evidence that scepticism or denial amongst the public has been on the rise. Ipsos MORI polling in 2005 showed that 91% believed that the climate was changing, with only 4% saying they did not. By 2010 those  that the climate was not changing had risen to 15%, with those believing down to 78%. Populus polling for the BBC showed that the proportion who were not convinced that climate change is man-made rose from 25% in 2009 to 41% in 2010, with the polls happening before and after the “Climategate” e-mail furore.

This apparent rise in public scepticism has a corrosive effect on policy debates. Last year the then DECC Secretary of State, Chris Huhne, felt sufficiently riled to send a public letter to lead UK denialist Nigel Lawson at the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) asserting the validity of climate science. During the US Republican Party primaries, Mitt Romney decided that he had to shift his position on climate change from belief to scepticism.

One kind of explanation for the rise of denialism is precisely the likes of Lawson, along with commentators in the media like James Delingpole of the Telegraph, and denialist organisations such as the GWPF, and the many similar outfits in the US. Lawson (and fellow GWPF sceptic Benny Pieser) have ben around for some time. Both are on record as challenging the scientific consensus as early as 2004. In the US, climate scepticism has been around for even longer, since the late 1990s or earlier. A key question is therefore why the public has started only recently to pay more attention to voices that have been in the public domain for a long time.

A similar kind of puzzle faces psychological explanations for scepticism. Research by Lorraine Whitmarsh at Cardiff University finds that scepticism increased between 2003 and 2008 amongst respondents to a postal survey, and that scepticism is linked to political values (Tories more likely to be sceptical) and environmental values. But since values, by definition, are quite stable over time, it proves hard to explain the rise in scepticism by reference to them. Again, the puzzle is why the last few years have seen such a shift in views.

An alternative view is that a wave of climate scepticism amongst the public in the US and UK (as opposed to the hard core professional denialists, who are always there) is a primarily a political phenomenon, linked to an upsurge in right-wing populism.

In his landmark study of populism, Paul Taggart argues that it is impossible to define, since it has assumed different shapes in different periods in different places – sometimes a popular movement, sometimes in the form of a party, sometimes left-wing, sometimes right-wing, etc. But he does argue that there are 6 common characteristics of the phenomenon:

1. Populists are hostile to representative politics. Populist leaders (from Poujade to Sarah Palin) try to channel “the plain speaking and plain speaking of ordinary people”. “The people” are represented as the majority (e.g. “silent majority”, Middle America, Middle England), and as having certain characteristics (virtue, hard working, civic, productive, but reluctant to get involved in the “minority (elite) pursuit of politics” (p 93). In the populist narrative, the link between the people and political representatives is broken in two ways: through the corruption of politics and politicians, and through the capture of politics and politicians by special interests. For right wing populists, this is about ‘minority’ groups who make claims for special rights (e.g. immigrants, environmentalists, feminists), where minority’ groups (whoever they are) are seen as being outside the ‘mainstream’ of politics (p 93).

2. Populists identify themselves with an idealised heartland within the community they favour, and against elites. Populists use the language of “the people” because they are trying to evoke the idea of the heartland - a “territory of the imagination” (p 95). The evocation of the heartland is backward-looking to an idealised past, and sentiment based, rather than forward-looking ideological utopias. The heartland idea also explains the singularity of populism: “the people” are presented as above class, as an undifferentiated mass. Crucially, the heartland excludes demonized social groups including political elites and special “minority” interests. It is also inward-looking: ”Internationalism and cosmopolitanism are anathema to populists…Isolationism and insularity are the natural predispositions of populists. This is why populism has been associated with ethical nationalism.” (p 95)

3. Populism has an ideology lacking in core values (it can be left or right wing, although recently in the UK and US has tended to be right wing). However, in the modern era, populism can be seen as a reaction to liberalism, since the hegemony of representative democracy (with all its compromises and messiness) reflects the power of liberal ideas: “Liberalism has a world-view that is constructed around individuals. Populism deals in collectives in its celebration of the people as an organic whole.”

4. Populism can be seen as a powerful reaction to a sense of extreme crisis, which can be economic, or social, or political. The crisis can be real but need not be, as long as there is perceived crisis. “The emergence of a crisis shakes populists out of their reluctance and into politics and into an active defence of the heartland” (p 4). The lack of ideological compass, combined with a demonisation of elites (including politicians, intellectuals, bankers etc) and a readiness to see danger around them, means that in a crisis populists are particularly susceptible to conspiracy theories (pp 105-06). According to Taggart, “Such theories also serve an important mobilizing function. Finding resonance with disgruntled sections of the population, conspiracy theories make sense of what might otherwise be disparate facts of life and, in doing so, provide incentive for individuals to join the campaign to frustrate whatever conspiracy has been frustrating them.” (p 105). Conspiracy theories, of course, are also circular and impervious to empirical evidence: “An academic investigation not whether a conspiracy theory exists is likely, for a conspiracy theorist, to be at best ineffective, and at worst in collusion with the conspiracy” (p 106). However, in the longer term, conspiracy theories are not useful tools for political organisation, as they stress the relative powerlessness of the populist constituency, i.e. the mass of ordinary people.

5. Populism contains fundamental dilemmas that make it self-limiting. Populists often don’t form parties, and where they do, they tend to run out of steam because populism is anti-politics. As a result initially populist parties tend either to become less populist over time, to become riven with conflicts internally, or to collapse.

6. Populism has a chameleon-like nature, adopting the political colours of its environment. Populism defines itself against mainstream issues and policies. Thus Scandinavian populism is anti-tax, French populism (and British) is anti-immigration,  etc.

Taggart also notes some features of the changed context of contemporary politics which have increased the scope for populism. One is globalisation and the development of supra-national institutions, including the UN and the EU:

“the prevalence of representative democratic institutions at a national level and the attempt to introduce them at supra-national level means that populists…have more potential sources of grievance. Through globalisation and the associated uncertainties of identity that come about with the construction…of a ‘global community’ there will be more impetus for those feeling excluded to take refuge in an imagined heartland. This will be true especially in so far as a sense of crisis is increasingly felt by those excluded from the new global community” (p 117)

It is also worth noting the important role of the media in populism in the 20th and 21st century. Fox News and shock-jock radio has been a powerful medium in the US for right wing populism, as it allows populist leaders to be outside of parties but still reach a mass audience, while the internet allows the spawning and spread of conspiracy theories on line.

Taggart’s description of populism has profound resonance for the current wave of climate scepticism among parts of the American and UK publics.

In the last decade, the emergence in popular climate scepticism in the US and UK has been accompanied by the rise of a right-wing populism, as seen in support for the Tea Party wing of Republicanism in the US, and in the UK by a populist wing in the Tories (exemplified perhaps by Douglas Carswell, MP for Clacton, a believer in radical political reform, “direct democracy” and sceptical on climate change), and the rise of groups like the UK Independence Party, whose head of policy is leading sceptic Christopher Monckton. This rise has been strongest amongst those who felt excluded from the benefits of globalisation, and in the UK has been reinforced especially through the 2010 expenses scandal (as this strongly resonated with idea that politicians are corrupt) and the financial crisis (as this resonated with the idea that the bankers and the elite are in cahoots and against the people).

Climate scepticism isn’t necessarily the lead issue for these movements and parties, but the issue has come to fit well into their agendas, and their leaders are on record with strong statements of climate scepticism. This emergence reflects the chameleon-like nature of populism. Populist movements began to emerge in the mid-2000s, and initially focused on the dominant issues of immigration in UK and healthcare reform in the US. However, as climate change was promoted by elites as an issue, peaking in salience in 2007 and in international visibility in 2009, populists reacted. Climate scepticism is also largely confined to such parties and movements – in the UK, there is a consensus belief in climate change amongst the leadership of the mainstream parties.

The expression of climate scepticism fits particularly well with populist themes as outlined in Taggart’s analysis. Climate scepticism is frequently expressed as a suspicion of intellectuals and environmentalists as special interests, outside of the heartland but corrupting politicians. Climate change is the ultimate cosmopolitan agenda, and is identified strongly with the UN and the EU, while populism is inherently insular and anti-cosmopolitan in nature. Indeed, in the UK, climate scepticism and Euro-scepticism seem to go together.

You can’t touch, see or smell greenhouse gases, impacts are complex, uncertain and mostly lie in the future, and individual events are not directly attributable to climate change, all of which are anathema to simplicity and common sense. These characteristics make climate change a perfect target for populist conspiracy theories. Last year’s review of evidence by genuine scientific sceptic Richard Muller convinced him that anthropogenic climate change is real, but he was instantly attacked by denialists. No amount of evidence works in the face of conspiracy theories.

The populist lens on climate scepticism has implications for what might be done about it. Current strategies - more strongly asserting the science (climate scientists and politicians) and undertaking media monitoring and instant rebuttals (groups like Carbon Brief) –  are unlikely to have much impact on a popular scepticism with a strong suspicion of elites (including scientists and environmentalists) and an element of conspiracy theory.

Instead, an approach informed by the populist analysis might take two forms, depending on the audience. One, aimed at the wider public, with the objective of limiting the corrosive effects of populist scepticism on policy, would be to portray climate deniers as people who can’t grow up and face the complexities and difficulties of the modern world. See David Mitchell’s superbly humorous version of this: “I wish it wasn’t true, but oh heck, it is.”

A second, aimed very much at sceptics amongst the public, would be to take advantage of the fact that high profile climate deniers, like Nigel Lawson or “Lord” Christopher Monckton, are members of the elite themselves, and that groups like the GWPF appear to receive financial backing from hedge funds. These facts are already in the public domain,  but much more could be done to use them to sow seeds of suspicion in the minds of populist followers of climate deniers. Figures like Lawson still manage to portray themselves as driven by the conviction of the lonely individual against the elite consensus, garnering empathy from populists. An effective strategy would be to reframe them as self-serving, attention seeking members of the elite whose agenda is shaped by money.

It seems to me that what appears to be a strong link between the emergence of climate scepticism and a populist turn in British politics is really worth further study, not least because it would further develop and refine such strategies. However, despite strenuous efforts, I have so far failed to persuade any of the main environmentalist organisations to back such a study.

Perhaps they simply hope it will all go away. Actually, this might (eventually) be the case. Taggart notes that populist politics is self-limiting. In the US, the influence of the Tea Party is already on the wane. UKIP may last longer but will almost certainly be riven with disagreements and leadership challenges. Populist followers become disillusioned with their leaders and their interest in political issues – and climate denialist messages – wanes. But I suspect that in the UK we are still some way off this outcome, and as a result, the road of climate policy is set to be rocky for some time to come.

In the year that sees a major international conference in Rio on sustainable development, cuts in fossil fuel subsidies would be very welcome. Global spending on such subsidies may be in the region of $600 billion this year, and they make dirty fuels like oil and coal cheaper – a sort of negative carbon tax. Moreover, they use up vast sums of public money that could be spent on health, education or infrastructure. Last year an estimated 20% of government spending in Indonesia went on fossil fuel subsidies, and in some Indian states, an even higher proportion goes to keeping coal-fired electricity cheap. This represents a vast potential development dividend.

Even worse, most of the benefits usually flow to the middle classes, who consume most of the petrol and electricity. Of the $22.5 billion spent by India on fossil fuel subsidies in 2010, less than $2 billion benefited the poorest 20 per cent of the population, according to International Energy Agency figures. The situation in Indonesia, Thailand, Pakistan and South Africa was similar and that in China only slightly better.

So on paper fossil fuel subsidy reform looks like an easy win-win policy for both the environment and development. But in the real world, as recent experience in Nigeria and Indonesia shows, the politics are much more complex. One striking fact is that protests are led not by the better off who gain most from subsidies, but by groups that are poorer (although not so poor that they find it too hard to organise protests). This is because subsidies matter proportionately more for those on low incomes, especially when the indirect effects of increased transport costs work through to prices more broadly. Second, while cutting subsidies may in theory free up resources for public goods, in many cases people have little confidence that this will happen given high levels of corruption. In Nigeria, poor people see subsidies as the only benefit they get from the country’s oil wealth. A third issue is that political parties have got used to deploying subsidies as a political tool, trying to wrong-foot opponents – a game that is currently being played out in the Indonesian case.

So all in all it is not too surprising that although the G20 governments pledged action to reform fuel subsidies in 2009, little has happened since. It is also unlikely that grand statements about sustainability emanating from the Rio+20 summit will have much effect. But what will, and what is clearly driving events in Nigeria and Indonesia, are rising oil prices. These are now reaching historic highs in real terms and the fiscal burden of fossil fuel subsidies (especially for oil and gas) is becoming untenable in a number of countries. There is a big opportunity here, but there are also big political risks. What is lacking, and what no amount of declarations on new “sustainable development goals” will provide, is a credible political strategy for fossil fuel subsidy reform at national level.

In the first three decades of the post-war world, the (mainly Keynesian) state was concerned with managing the business cycle, organising transfers from rich to poor and providing public services. Following the crisis of the 1970s, a shift of focus to efficiency and mass privatisation, the nature of the state changed to a mainly regulatory role. But, argues Helm:

“In the second decade of the twenty-first century…the key challenge is not only to deal with the immediate issues of debt and the deficits, but also the wider issues, from pensions and care for ageing populations, through to the environment. Not only is it widely agreed (at least politically) that current debt levels and deficits are unsustainable, but the provisions for future pensions and health, and the protection of the atmosphere and biodiversity have moved from being specialist interests into the mainstream… They share one key feature: they are all long term and intergenerational in character. The economic borders of the state….are currently not designed with this intergenerational perspective to the fore.”

Helm goes on to argue that the main aim of the 21st century state should be to maintain a range of assets that we are currently running down.  These include conventional assets such as infrastructure (one of his favourite hobbyhorses) but also environmental, financial and even social assets. Where we do run down a natural asset, we should offset it by new investment, not consumption – Norway has done this with its sovereign wealth fund based on oil extraction; the UK spent its oil and gas money on a 25 year consumption splurge. What is needed to make this new 21st century state operational, is a public balance sheet – an account of all the public (i.e. social) assets (including environmental ones) and liabilities. This in turn would require us to develop better measures of them. Our current measure of progress, GDP, is a flow measure, not a stock measure, and also a gross measure, not taking into account depreciation of capital.

Helm’s argument is interesting, partly because it contextualises climate change as one of several long term intergenerational problems that the UK and the wider world is going to have to solve, and partly because it is an argument for fundamental institutional change of a concrete type that is not often heard in the climate change echo-chamber.

However, for me, the analysis immediately raises a question, but also a potential answer to that question. The question is how the 21st century state is supposed to emerge politically. As I’ve argued elsewhere, for this kind of major institutional change, you need an organised political constituency that will press for change, and by definition, future generations can’t do that.

It might just be possible for an enlightened political elite to create such a shift of focus for the state, but I would also argue for that to happen, we will have to first live in a more equal society. Helm’s asset based society is one in which there has to be (at least for the forseeable future), lower consumption and higher savings, to fund the necessary investment. This may be fine for well-off university professors, but as has been well documented, income inequality in countries like the UK has increased sharply, and even in the booming 2000s, real incomes in the lower-middle part of the income distribution were stagnating. Putting oil money aside for investment in the future, Norwegian style, imposing regressive carbon taxes or requiring higher pension contributions are all politically easier if everyone really is comfortable and doesn’t feel left behind, but it will be a lot harder in highly unequal Britain, where large parts of the population already feel financially squeezed.

Helm largely ignores distributional issues, and he doesn’t broach the politics of the 21st century state, but I suspect that they will be central to its construction.

1. As new boy in DECC, Ed Davey seems to have been ambushed by the gas industry, with a ruling allowing new gas power plants to emit up to 450 gCO2/kWh out to 2045. This move will mean that there will be no requirement to fit carbon capture and storage. Someone should tell the Climate Change Committee, who say that average emissions from electricity generation need to be 50 gCO2/kWh by 2030 to meet the 4th carbon budget. The DECC press release unusually quotes George Osborne, so either Davey has already given in to the Treasury within a few weeks, in a way that Chris Huhne managed to avoid for almost 2 years, or else he has done some clever deal in the budget.

2. The strength of public sentiment on fuel tax remains very, very strong. Anthony Wells over at ukpollingreport reports on a YouGov Sunday Times poll:

Unsurprisingly the overwhelming majority of people (77%) would support a decrease in the level of fuel duty. There is still a substantial majority in favour when YouGov asked people to balance the competing priorities of cutting the deficit or cutting fuel duty – 59% think it is more important to cut fuel duty compared to 20% who think it is more important to cut the deficit.

“If the deficit has little to with the wellbeing of our children and grandchildren, global warming has everything to do with it. We run the risk of handing them a planet without many of the fascinating features that we had the opportunity to enjoy (for example, coral reefs that are dying, plant and animal species that are becoming extinct, landscapes that are being transformed). Far more seriously, we face the likelihood of handing them a planet in which hundreds of millions of people risk death by starvation due to drought in central Africa, or through flooding in Bangladesh and other densely populated low-lying areas in Asia, as a result of human caused global warming.”

The point is that, in Baker’s words, “the main factor that will determine the economic wellbeing of our children and grandchildren will be the strength of the economy that we pass down to them”. A crucial part of this strength will be the state of the natural environment, which will in turn depend on the kinds of investments we make now.

Put these arguments together – (i) borrowing does not create a net burden, (ii) future welfare depends on the state of the economy, which is strongly influenced by investments today and (iii) the need to make investments that do not erode natural resources (what Partha Dasgupta calls genuine investment) – and you have the idea that Duncan Foley has put forward, that we can borrow now to cover the additional costs of low carbon investments. Future generations will be better off, even with the higher levels of debt, and we will not have to reduce consumption today. Overall, Foley’s position is that ”global warming presents no novel issues of the distribution of economic welfare between generations that are not already inherent in other investment choices”. The key issue in how far to pursue this approach is the value future generations place on a lower stock of GHGs in the atmosphere relative to conventional (high carbon) capital stock.

Foley’s approach may offend the moral principles of some – isn’t it wrong that future generations should have to pay for cleaning up the mess that we have made? However, the point is that future generations would still be better off than if we did nothing, and if borrowing makes it politically possible to act, then that has to be better than expecting additional costs to come out of the pockets of today’s consumers and hitting a political brick wall.

But take a look again, and the glass begins to look half empty. First, as many commentators point out, this agreement pushes legally binding action to reduce emissions so far into the future that it may well be too late to prevent warming of 3-4C. Second,  it’s important to remember that Durban was talks about talks, in which the only commitment made was to keep the international process alive. This is a bit like the opening of the Doha Round of trade negotiations in 2001, which are still shuffling forward, zombie-like, 10 years later. We do not know what will happen over the course of these new climate negotiations (which in the US could mostly happen under a Republican administration). Third, Scott Barrett’s classic analysis suggests that if a new agreement has the same structure of the Kyoto Protocol, it is likely to be too weak to be effective, but there is every reason to think that the focus will continue to be on targets, rather than incentives or enforcement (although see below). Last, a new agreement will have to be implemented, and especially if it has weak enforcement mechanisms, whether it can be enforced will depend heavily on domestic politics.

The interesting question at this stage is why agreement to negotiate a new agreement was reached, and especially why the two key players, China and the US, came on board. Clearly, the EU, G77 and AOSIS were the prime movers, but there would have been no meaningful deal without the big 2, and so far the climate imperative has not been powerful enough for them to overcome other forces. Of course part of the answer is that this agreement doesn’t require much of anyone. There are no emissions reductions targets, and no enforcement mechanisms. The US and China (and anyone else) could walk away from negotiations at any point (and they may well yet do that). But at least one important new principle lies at the heart of the new agreement – that new negotiations will lead to targets that will apply to all countries, and not just the current Annex 1 group, even if it is still ambiguous as to whether those targets will be legally binding. This is what the US wanted, so it is perhaps not hard to understand in the end why Todd Stern signed. But why did China agree, since it, along with India, has been the strongest voice against this principle?

The answer may lie in the possibility that the incentives in the collective action problem are slowly but surely shifting. In most accounts of the climate collective action problem, including Barrett’s, the incentives are to free-ride, because there are up-front costs to reducing emissions, while benefits are distant in time and uncertain. However, it is clear that for China at least, the incentives may now be changing. China has sunk considerable effort and cost into developing clean energy industries (and jobs), from wind and solar to electric vehicles, and it is even now beginning to show a bit of interest in carbon capture. To get a pay-off from this investment, China will need secure markets for these technologies abroad, so it does need the rest of the world, and especially OECD countries, to adopt sufficiently credible targets to drive those markets, which in the end means a meaningful international agreement. This will come at a domestic cost, because to achieve it (and especially America’s commitment), China will also have to sign up to binding targets. But China’s leaders may well see this as an acceptable cost, especially since reducing emissions can also offer energy security and local polllution co-benefits.

The new research cited by Harvey turns out to be a document called The Carbon Plan, basically yet another strategy document looking ahead to 2020, 2030 and 2050. Chris Huhne’s foreword does seem to put a similar gloss on the numbers: “By 2020 we will complete the ‘easy wins’ that have helped emissions to fall by a quarter since 1990.”

But this is really a piece of spin. Drilling down into the underlying figures (also available from the UK government), we find a slightly different story.

First, while greenhouse gas emissions emitted from within the UK are down by over 25% since 1990, carbon dioxide emissions are down by less than 17%, on the provisional 2010 data.  It is widely known that overall greenhouse gas emissions in the UK are down substantially since 1990, and it has been apparent that we would exceed our Kyoto target easily, but it has also long been thought that we would miss our own domestic target of 20% reduction in CO2 by 2010, and so it has proved (would have been worse without the recession). There is clearly some sleight of hand here, picked up by the Guardian and reproduced as “emissions fell by 25.2%”. This might sound like pedantry – surely its GHG emissions that count, so who cares? But the difference matters because it has proven much easier to cut other GHG (mostly methane) emissions in the past (down 54% 1990 to 2010), whereas it is carbon dioxide emissions that we really have to cut in the future. It is the latter that have to be cut if we want to show leadership. And of course the figures reported in the plan don’t include shipping and aviation. The other point on targets, as we have mentioned before, is that UK CO2 emissions on the more appropriate consumption basis (as opposed to the official production figures) are well  up since 1990, of the order to 20-30%.

A second issue is that, while there has indeed been some decarbonisation in the power sector, this all happened in the 1990s, the dash for gas period. Greenhouse gas emissions (almost all CO2) from power stations fell by almost 28% between 1990 and 1999. This was pre-emissions trading, and largely the result of privatisation and changes in the relative price of coal and gas. Since 1999, and over the period when climate policy started to come in more seriously, emissions from the power sector rose again by around 20% to the pre-recession height in 2007. Sure, we have built more renewables, but it hasn’t been enough to offset the resurgence in coal use.

Another odd thing is about the residential sector. Despite all the action on insulation and boilers, emissions from the residential sector are higher in 2010 than they were in 1990. This may have been due to the cold winter in the latter year, but pre-crash emissions were still about the same level as they were in the early 1990s. There has been some decline since the early 2000s, but it’s not earth-shattering.

The one sector that really has seen big declines in CO2 emissions (20% between 1990 and 2007) is the business sector.  According to a recent UK Energy Research Council study, this fall has been due to improvements in efficiency rather declining output or the loss of heavy industry (which had mostly happened by 1990). Unlike the power sector, most of the fall has been in the 2000s, not the 1990s. This is in fact the only part of the economy where the UK may have a claim to be walking the walk (transport emissions flatlined).

This is not a bad achievement in itself, but it gets lost in the noise. Government will spin the figures to exaggerate policy impact and protect its reputation. Environmentalists and various industry lobbies will also be selective and look for stats that make performance look bad. The recent exchange on the costs of offshore wind as a proportion of household energy bills is a good example. What we need is good reporting that can cut through both sets of bias and tell it like it is.