1. Outline
This is a letter from Nigel Topping CMG, Chair of the Climate Change Committee, to Toby Perkins MP, Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee.
The letter provides further clarity in response to points raised during the Environmental Audit Committee’s inquiry into the Climate Change Committee’s advice on the Seventh Carbon Budget.
2. Key messages
- Our recommended level for the Seventh Carbon Budget, a limit on the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions over the five-year period 2038 to 2042, is 535 MtCO2e, including emissions from international aviation and shipping. This is 87% below 1990 levels.
- The choice to base our advice on a single modelled pathway partly reflects our assessment that the best way forward in several areas is now clearer than it was at the time of our last advice.
- Given the balance of investment costs and operating savings, the overall cost of meeting the Balanced Pathway is estimated to be around £4 billion per year on average between 2025 and 2050 (relative to the baseline). This translates to around 0.2% of GDP.
- Decarbonising and switching to homegrown low-cost renewables will reduce our reliance on foreign fossil fuels. In the Balanced Pathway, average household energy bills in 2040 would be 15 times less sensitive to a spike in gas prices like the one we had in 2022 than the no further action baseline.
- In the Balanced Pathway we only include technologies that are expected to become sufficiently established to reach large-scale operation or adoption in the UK before 2050.
- Behaviour change is included in our modelling. Demand measures make up 22% of emissions reduction by 2040.
