There’s no such thing as domestic climate policy: An interview with John Ashton
The UK’s lack of coherent energy narrative is hurting its very real position as a source of high ambition in international negotiations, former special representative for climate change, John Ashton, tells Carbon Brief.
Advocating ambition
Even the most dedicated energy fans are feeling fatigue as negotiations over UK energy policy pause for the summer’s parliamentary recess. Years of wrangling over the price new nuclear power stations will receive for their electricity, whether the bill will contain a 2030 target for reducing the emissions of the power sector, and the role of energy efficiency will restart in September.
Since stepping down as the UK’s chief climate diplomat, Ashton is keen to keep discussion on the UK’s energy future going. “This is a crucial period,” he says.
Since joining the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in 1978, John Ashton established a career focused on the international politics of climate change, eventually becoming head of the FCO’s environment, science and technology department.
After taking time out to co-found environmental thinktank E3G, he served between 2006 and 2012 as special representative on climate change to three consecutive foreign secretaries. Ashton now has a one-day-a-week role as a policy fellow at Imperial College’s Grantham Institute for Climate Change. He’s still concerned with climate diplomacy, in all its forms. To practice effective climate diplomacy, the UK has to walk the walk, he says:
“The UK’s climate diplomacy is among the best in the world. But it all rests on the proposition that we will do ourselves what we are encouraging others to do. This is a crucial period â?¦ [A government] can’t stand for an effective response to climate change if it is not engaging in a serious effort to build a carbon neutral energy system within its own economy within a generation or so.
“In the last few years the effort to do that has become increasingly contested in British politics. That in turn has inhibited investment in the low carbon economy in Britain and weakened our international leverage in driving up ambition elsewhere.”
UK as climate leader
Some including the UK’s Chancellor, George Osborne, have argued that the UK is largely irrelevant to global climate politics. The argument goes that our impact on global emissions is small, and we have little power to influence other countries’ level of ambition on climate policy. Why should the UK spend money on cutting its carbon footprint when coal-fuelled behemoths like China and India show no sign of doing the same?
Perhaps unsurprisingly Ashton disagrees:
“Other countries have seen what the UK has done already. TheClimate Change Act is the most ambitious and robust climate legislation in the world. People saw it pass with strong support across the political spectrum, and this has greatly strengthened the hand of those who want to do the same in other countries.”
Ashton points to Mexico, China and South Korea , which he says “have all put a lot of effort” into looking at what the UK has done in implementing climate change legislation when formulating their own, different, climate action plans.
Mexico passed a climate change law last year with a huge bipartisan majority, which requires a 50 per cent reduction in emissions below 2000 levels by 2050 and for 35 per cent of the country’s electricity to come from renewable sources by 2024.
Aside from providing a legislation model that other countries can adapt – and improve on – to their own circumstances, Ashton says the UK has gained the respect of other nations in another important area: climate science. He explains:
“British climate science is world class, and has been seen to make a major contribution to the way we understand the problem. Not many people know this, but when President Obama was dealing with Hurricane Sandy, he was basing his decisions on forecasts from the UK Met Office Hadley Centre about how the storm would develop. Obama’s own advisors recognized that these were better than US projections.”
Delivering change
Of course, the UK’s standing in the climate diplomacy world isn’t just about domestic policies. Ashton argues the UK’s diplomatic efforts over the years have built trust in the country, allowing it to act as a force for high ambition.
Ashton points to an early example: former Prime Minister, Tony Blair’s, decision to use the UK’s G8 presidency in 2005 to put climate change at the top of the agenda for the G8 summit in Gleneagles that year. That helped get climate change on leaders’ agendas, he says, and onto front pages around the world.
The UK was also instrumental in the emergence of the military as a voice in the climate debate, Ashton says. In 2007, the country petitioned to hold a debate on climate change at the UN Security Council:
“It had become clear that failure to deal with climate change would be a huge driver of insecurity globally, and the most important place where the world may have a conversation about the preconditions for global security is the Security Council. Despite resistance – including from the US – the UK succeeded. The debate was the most heavily subscribed since the UN was founded in 1946.”
Ashton says:
“We found was a strong appetite to have that conversation – including in the US. Our interpretation of that is that these constituencies are very good at analysing risk. And if you want to have a productive conversation about climate change, it is important that you understand the risks it poses to your national interest.”
And despite the protestations of those who point to its high-carbon growth model, Ashton believes that away from the headlines there is something significant going on in China. He adds:
“The announcement of low-carbon pilot zones encompassing over 300 million people in China reflected several years of quiet diplomacy between the UK and EU on one side, and China on the other.”
A question of legitimacy
In the past ten years the world has moved on. Interest in international climate negotiations has waned over the decade as governments struggle with pressing economic problems. Ashton sees the two as closely linked:
“Up until the financial crisis, Europe had established real momentum in its response to climate change and its efforts to shift to a low carbon growth model. European leaders have understandably been distracted and as a result there has been some loss of momentum – although it’s still true that Europe remains at the forefront of the global response to climate change”.
But isn’t conflict between virtuous-sounding climate policy and the need for economic stimulus inevitable? It’s all too easy to make grand promises during the good times, but the narrative all over the world has turned simply to reinstating any kind of growth – and that seems to come at the expense of higher carbon emissions in order to be cost-effective at all.
At a UK and European level, he says there must be policies that give a clear path for carbon neutral electricity, increased renewables and an ambitious carbon cap that extend beyond the current targets.
Ashton says the prospect of a 2030 target for decarbonising the UK electricity sector would be one important tool that could help provide impetus for increased renewable power on the grid, giving investors the certainty they need.
To spur further action from others, he argues, Europe must show it can make low carbon growth work:
“Those who want lower ambition in the EU and UK ask why we should do this when others aren’t. But the reality is that countries like China have dramatically scaled up their own ambition. Arguably nobody is now doing more than China to transform their growth model.
“There’s an urgent need to rebuild the political rationale for Europe and to make it inspiring again for young Europeans. It is very hard at the moment to see what that will look like, but the idea of a Europe building a low carbon growth model as a basis for climate and energy security will probably somewhere close to the heart of it.”
The view of the UK acting as a leader on climate policy – both alone and as part of a European project – has taken a battering in the media and the polls in recent years. The coalition government is now openly divided on many of the issues that contributed to the UK’s legitimacy as a force for high ambition, Ashton points out.
That legitimacy still stands – at least for the moment. But with the UK energy bill due to be finalised later this year, he argues, the world will be watching.