Climate Change Committee head says Rishi Sunak has set us back on climate change
In autumn 2023, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak delayed a ban on new petrol and diesel cars, and weakened targets on phasing out gas boilers, as part of a major shift in green policy.
In an interview with Laura Kuenssberg broadcast on BBC TV on 21 April 2024, Chris Stark, head of the Climate Change Committee (CCC) said “I think it’s set us back. We have moved [away] from a position where we were really at the forefront, pushing ahead as quickly as we could on something that I believe to be fundamental to the UK economy, fundamentally beneficial to the people living in this country, whether you care about the climate or not.”
The UK has been successful in “decarbonising how we generate electricity, especially by closing coal-fired powerplants”, he said, but to get to net zero, more needs to be done on “how we heat homes, or how we deal with the industrial emissions that we have in this country, what we do with farming [and] transport systems. It’s in those other areas that we see the gap, I definitely feel we’re at risk.”
For more about this interview and the response from Downing Street and others, see the BBC website.