The economics of clean energy “just get better and better”, leaving opponents of the transition looking like “King Canute”, says Chris Stark.

Stark is head of the UK government’s “mission” to deliver clean power by 2030, having previously been chief executive of the advisory Climate Change Committee (CCC).

In a wide-ranging interview with Carbon Brief, Stark makes the case for the “radical” clean-power mission, which he says will act as “huge insurance” against future gas-price spikes.

He pushes back on “super daft” calls to abandon the 2030 target, saying he has a “huge disagreement” on this with critics, such as the Tony Blair Institute.

Stark also takes issue with “completely…crazy” attacks on the UK’s Climate Change Act, warns of the “great risk” of Conservative proposals to scrap carbon pricing and stresses – in the face of threats from the climate-sceptic Reform party – the importance of being a country that respects legal contracts.

He says: “The problems and woes of this country, in terms of the cost of energy, are due to fossil fuels, not due to the Climate Change Act.”

The UK should become an “electrostate” built on clean-energy technologies, says Stark, but it needs a “cute” strategy on domestic supply chains and will have to interact with China.

Beyond the UK, despite media misinformation and the US turn against climate action, Stark concludes that the global energy transition is “heading in one direction”:

“You’ve got to see the movie, not the scene. The movie is that things are heading in one direction, towards something cleaner. Good luck if you think you can avoid that.”

Carbon Brief: Thanks very much for joining us today. Chris, you’re in charge of the government’s mission for clean power by 2030. Can you just explain what the point of that mission is?

Chris Stark: Well, we’re trying to do something radical in a short space of time. And maybe if I start with the backstory to that, Ed Miliband, as secretary of state, was looking for a project where he could make a difference quickly. And the reason that we are focused on clean power 2030 is because it is that project. It has all the characteristics of something that you can do quickly, but which has long-term benefits.

What we’re trying to do is to accelerate a process that was already underway of decarbonising the power system, but to do so in a time when we feel it’s essential that we start that journey and move it more quickly, because in the 2030s we’re expecting the demand for electricity to grow. So this is a bit of a sprint to get ourselves prepped for where we think we need to be from 2030 onwards. And it’s also, coming to my role, it’s the job I want to do, because I spent many years advising that you should decarbonise the economy by electrifying – and stage one of that is to finish the job on cleaning up the supply.

So it’s kind of the perfect project, really. And if you want to do clean power by 2030, [the] first thing is to say we’re not going to take an overly purist approach to that. So we admit and are conscious – in fact, find it useful – to have gas in the mix between now and 2030. The challenge is to run it down to, if we can, 5% of the total mix in 2030 and to grow the clean stuff alongside it. So, using gas as a flexible source, and that, we think is a great platform to grow the demand for electricity on the journey, but especially after 2030 – and that’s when the decarbonisation really kicks in.

So it’s a sort of exciting thing to try and do. And if you want to do it, here comes the interesting thing. You need the whole system, all the policies, all the institutions, all the interactions with the private sector, interactions with the consumer, to be lined up in the right way.

So clean power by 2030 is also the best expression of how quickly we want the planning system to work, how much harder we want the energy institutions like NESO [the National Energy System Operator] and energy regulator Ofgem to support it – and how we want to send a message to investors that they should come here to do their investment. Turns out, it’s a great way of advertising all of that and making it happen. And so far, it’s working great.

CB: Thanks. So do you still think it’s achievable? We’re sitting in “mission control”. You’ve got some big screens on the wall. Is there anything on those screens that’s flashing red at the moment?

CS: So, right behind you are the big screens. And it’s tremendously useful to have a room, a physical space, where we can plan this stuff and coordinate this stuff. There’s lots of things that flash red. There’s no question. And it’s an expression of it being a genuine mission. This is not business as usual. So you wouldn’t move as quickly as this, unless you’ve set your North Star around it. And it does frame all the things that, especially this department is doing, but also the rest of government, in terms of the story of where we are.

We’re approaching two years into this mission and – really important to say – if the mission is about constructing infrastructure, it’s in that timeframe that you’ll do most of the work, setting it up so that we get the things that we think we need for 2030 constructed.

We’re already reaching the end of that phase one, and we did that by first of all, going as hard and as fast as we could to establish a plan for 2030, which involved us going first to the energy system operator, NESO, to give us their independent advice. We then turned that into a plan, and the expression of that plan is largely that we need to see construction of new networks, new generation, new storage and a new set of retail models to make all of that stick together well for the consumer.

Phase one was about using that plan to try and go hard at a set of super-ambitious technology ranges for all the clean technologies, so onshore wind, offshore wind, solar [and] also the energy storage technologies. We’ve set a range that we’re trying to hit by 2030 that is right at the top end of what we think is possible. Then we went about constructing the policies to make that happen.

Behind you on the big screens, what we’re often doing is looking at the project pipeline that would deliver that [ambition]. At the heart of it is the idea that if you want to do something quickly by 2030, there is a project pipeline already in development that will deliver that for you, if you can curate it and reorder it to deliver. And therefore, the most important and radical thing that we did – alongside all the reforms to things like contracts for difference and the kind of classic policy support – is this very radical reordering of the connection queue, which allows us to put to the front of the queue the projects that we think will deliver what we need for 2030 – and into the 2030s.

Then, alongside that, the other big thing, and I think this is going to be more of a priority in the second phase of work for us, is the networks themselves. We are trying to essentially build the plane while it flies by contracting the generation whilst also building the networks, and of course, doing this connection queue reform at the same time. That is, again, radical, but the programme of investment in infrastructure and in networks is genuinely once in a generation and we haven’t really done investment at this scale since the coal-fired generation was first planned. We think a lot about 88 – we think – really critical transmission upgrades. We really need them to be on time, because the consumer will see the benefit of each one of those upgrades.

CB: You already talked about electricity demand growing as the economy electrifies. Do you think that there’s a risk that we could hit the clean power 2030 target, but at the same time, perhaps meeting it accidentally, by not electrifying as quickly as we think – and therefore demand not growing as quickly?

CS: So, an unspoken – we need to clearly make this more of a factor – an unspoken factor in the shape of the energy system we have today has been an assumption, for well over 20 years, really, that demand for electricity was always going to pick up. In fact, what we’ve seen is the opposite. So for about a quarter of a century, demand has fallen. Interestingly, the system – the energy system, the electricity system – generally plans for an increase in demand that never arrives. We could have a much longer conversation about why that happened and the institutional framework that led to that. But it is nonetheless the case.

I think we are at the point now where we are starting to see the signal of that demand increase – and it is largely being driven by electric vehicle uptake. The story of net-zero and decarbonisation does rest on electrification at a much bigger scale than just electric cars. So part of what we’re trying to do is prepare for that moment.

But you’re absolutely right, if demand doesn’t increase, the biggest single challenge will be that we’ve got a lot of new fixed costs and a bigger system – on the generation side and the network side – that are being spread over a demand base that’s too small. So, slightly counter-intuitively, because there’s a lot of coverage around the world about the concern about the increase in electricity demand, I want that increase in electricity demand, but I also want it to be of a particular type. So if we can, we want to grow the demand for electricity with flexible demand, as much as possible, that is matching – as best we can – the availability of the supply when the wind blows or the sun shines. That makes the system itself cheaper.

The more electricity demand we see, the more those fixed costs that are in the system – for networks and increasingly for the large renewable projects – the more they are spread over a bigger demand base and the lower the unit costs of electricity, which will be good, in turn, for the uptake of more and more electrification in the future. So there’s this virtuous circle that comes from getting this right. In terms of where we go next with clean power 2030, a big part of that story needs to be electrification. We want to see more electricity demand, again, of the right sort, if we can. More flexible demand and, again, [the] more that that is on the system, the better the system will operate – and the cheaper it will be for the consumer.

CB: So, the UK has among the highest electricity prices of any major economy. Can you just talk through why you think that is – and what we should be doing about it?

CS: Yeah, there’s a story that the Financial Times runs every three months about the cost of electricity – and particularly industrial electricity prices. Every time that happens, we slightly wince here, because it’s largely the product of decades of [decisions] before us.

We do have high electricity prices and we absolutely need to bring them down. For those industrial users, we’ve got a whole package of things that will come on, over the next few months, into next year, that will make a big difference, I think. For those industrial users, [it will] take those energy prices down very significantly, probably below the sort of prices that you’ll see on the continent, and that, I hope, will help.

But we have a bigger plan to try and do something about electricity prices for all consumers. I think it’s worth just dwelling on this: two-thirds of electricity consumption is not households, it’s commercial. So the biggest part of this is the commercial electricity story – and then the rest, the final third, is for households. The politics of this, obviously, is around households.

You’ve seen in the last six months, this government has focused really hard on the cost of living and one of the best tools – if you want to go hard at it, to improve the cost of living – is energy bills. So the budget last year was a really big thing for us. It involved months of work – actually in this room. We commandeered this room to look solely at packages of policy that would reduce household bills quickly and landed on a package that was announced in the budget last year, that will take £150 off household bills from April. That’s tremendous – and it’s the sort of thing that we were advising when I was in the Climate Change Committee – because the core of that is to take policy costs off electricity bills, particularly, and to put them into general taxation, where [you have] slightly more progressive recovery of those costs.

But there’s not another one of those enormous packages still to come. What we’re dealing with, to answer your question, is a set of system costs, as we think of them, that are out there and must be recovered. Now we’ve chosen, in the first instance, to move some of those costs into general taxation. The next phase of this involves us doing the investments that we think we need for 2030, which will add to some of those fixed costs, but doing so because we are going to facilitate a lower wholesale price for electricity, that we think will at least match and probably outweigh those extra costs.

That opens up a further thing, which I think is where we’ll go next with this story, on the consumer side, which is that we want to give the opportunity to more consumers – be they commercial or household – to flexibly use that power when it’s available, and to do so in a way that makes that power cheaper for them.

You most obviously see that in something we published just a few weeks ago, the “warm homes plan”, which, in its DNA, is about giving packages of these technologies to those households that most need them. So solar panels, batteries and eventually heat pumps in the homes that are most requiring of that kind of support, to allow them to access the cheaper energy that’s been available for a while, actually, if you’re rich enough to have those technologies already. That notion of a more flexible tech-enabled future, which gives you access to cheaper electricity, is where I think you will see the further savings that come beyond that £150. So the £150 is a bit like a down payment on all of that, but there’s still a lot more to come on that. And in a sense, it’s enabled by the clean power mission.

You know, we are moving so quickly on this now and maybe the final thing to say is that as we bring more and more renewables under long-term contracts – hopefully at really good value, discovered through an auction – we will be displacing more and more gas. If you look back over the last two auctions, it’s quite staggering, 24 gigawatts [GW] – I think it is maybe more than that – we’ve contracted through two auction rounds. The amount of gas we’re displacing when that stuff comes online is a huge insurance [policy] against the next price spike that [there] will be, inevitably, [at] some point in the future for gas prices. There’s usually one or two of these price spikes every decade. So, when that moment comes, we’re going to be much better insulated from it, because of these – I think – really good-value contracts that we’re signing for renewables.

CB: We’ve seen quite a few public interventions by energy bosses recently – just this week, Chris O’Shea at Centrica, saying that electricity prices by 2030 could be as high as they were in the wake of Russia invading Ukraine. Just as a reminder, at that point, we were paying more than twice as much per unit of electricity as we’re paying now – or we would have been if the government hadn’t stepped in with tens of billions in subsidies. Can I just get your response to those comments from Chris O’Shea?

CS: Well, listen, Chris and I know each other well. In fact, he’s a Celtic fan, he lives around the corner from me in Glasgow and he comes up for Celtic games regularly. So I do occasionally speak to him about these things. I don’t think he’s right on this. To put it as simply as I can, our view is very definitely that as we bring on the projects that we’re contracting in AR6 [auction round six], AR7 and into AR8 and 9, as those projects are connected and start generating, we are going to see lower prices. That doesn’t mean that we’re complacent about this, but we’ve got, I would say, a really well-grounded view of how that would play out over the next few years. And you know, £150 off bills next year is only part one of that story. So I’m much more optimistic than Chris is about how quickly we can bring bills down.

CB: This government was obviously elected on a pledge to cut bills by £300 from 2024 to 2030. Do you think that’s achievable? You talked about £150 pounds. That’s half…

CS: Well if Ed [Miliband, energy secretary] were here, he would remind you it was up to £300. And of course, that matters. But yes, I do think – of course – I think that’s well in scope. I don’t want to gloss over this, though; there are real challenges here. We are entering a period where there’s a lot of investment needed in our energy system and our power system.

I think there’s a hard truth to this, that any government – of any colour – would face the same challenge. You cannot have a system without that investment, unless you are dicing with a future where you’re not able to meet that future demand that we keep referring to. So I think we’re doing a really prudent thing, which is approaching that investment challenge in the right way, to spread the costs in the right way for the consumer – so they don’t see those impacts immediately – and to get us to the to the situation where we’re able to sustain and meet the future demands that this country will have, in common with any other country in the world as it starts to electrify at scale. That’s what we should be talking about.

We have really tried to push that argument, particularly with the offshore wind results, where we were making the counter case, that if you don’t think that offshore wind is the answer for this, then you need to look to gas – and new gas is far more expensive. In a world where you’re having to grow the size of the overall power system, I think it’s very prudent to do what we’re doing. So the network costs, the renewables costs that are coming, these are all part of the story of us getting prepared for the system that we need in the future, at the best possible price for the consumer. But of course, we would like to see a quicker impact here. We’d like to see those bills fall more quickly and I think we still have a few more tools in the box to play.

CB: There’s an argument around that the clean power mission is, in fact, part of the problem, or even the biggest problem, in driving high bills. Do you think that getting rid of the mission would help to cut bills, as the Tony Blair Institute’s been suggesting?

CS: I have a huge disagreement with the Tony Blair Institute on this. I mean, step back from this. The word mission gets bandied around a lot and I am very pleased that this mission continues. Mission government is quite a difficult thing to do and we’re definitely delivering against the objectives that we set ourselves. But it’s interesting just to step back and understand why that’s happening. We deliberately aimed high with this mission because if you are mission-driven, that’s what you should do. You should pitch your ambitions to…the top of where you think you can reach, in the knowledge that you shouldn’t do that at any price. We’ve made that super clear, consistently. This is not clean power at any price. But also in the knowledge that if you aim your ambitions high, in a world where actually most of the work is done by the private sector, they need to see that you mean it – and we mean it.

There’s a feedback loop here that, the more that the industry that does the investment and puts these projects in the ground, the more that they see we mean it, the more confident they are to do the projects, the more we can push them to go even faster. And Ed, in particular, has really stuck to his guns on this, because his view is, the minute you soften that message, the more likely it is [that] the whole thing fails.

So occasionally, you know – our expression of clean power is 95% clean in the year 2030 – occasionally you get people, particularly in the energy industry itself, say, “wow, you know, maybe it’d be better if you said 85%”. The reality is, if you said 85%, you wouldn’t get 85%, you would get 80%, so there’s a need to keep pushing the envelope here, because if we all stick to our guns, we’ll get to where we need to get to.

And that message on price, I have to say that was one of the best things last year, is that Ed Miliband made a really important speech at the Energy UK conference, to say to the industry, we will support offshore wind, but only if it shows the value that we think it needs to show for the consumer. And the industry stepped up and delivered on that. So that’s part of the mission. So that’s a very long way of saying I think it’s daft – like, super daft – to step back from something that’s so clearly working now.

CB: The Conservatives, in opposition, are claiming that we could cut bills by getting rid of carbon pricing and not contracting for any more renewables. They say getting rid of carbon pricing would make gas power cheap. What’s your view on their proposals and what impact would it have if they were followed through?

CS: Well, look, carbon pricing has a much bigger role to play. We absolutely have to have carbon pricing in the system and in this economy, if you want to make progress on our climate objectives. It also has been a very successful tool, actually sending the right message to the industry to invest in the alternatives – the low-carbon alternatives – and that is one of the reasons why this country is doing very well, actually, cleaning up the supply of electricity – quite remarkably so actually, we really stand out. I think it’s a great risk to start playing around with that system.

My main concern, though, is that the interaction with our friends on the continent [in the EU] does depend on us having carbon pricing in place. A lot of the stuff that I read – and not particularly talking about the Conservative proposals here at all, actually – but some of the commentary on this imagines a world where we are acting in isolation. Actually, we need to remember that Europe is erecting – and has erected now – a carbon border around it. Anything that we try to export to that territory, if it doesn’t have appropriate carbon pricing around it, will simply be taxed.

I think we need to remember that we’re in an interconnected world and that carbon pricing is part of that story. In the end, we won’t have a problem if we remove the fossil [fuel] from the system in the first place, that’s causing those costs. I think we’re following the right track on this. In a sense, my strategy isn’t to worry so much about the carbon pricing bit of it. It’s to displace the dirty stuff with clean stuff. That strategy, in the end, is the most effective one of all. It doesn’t matter what the ETS [emissions trading system] is telling you in terms of carbon pricing or what the carbon price floor is, we won’t have to worry at all about that if we have more and more of this clean stuff on the system.

CB: Just in terms of that idea that gas is actually really cheap, if only we could ignore carbon pricing. What do you think about that?

CS: Well, gas prices fluctuate enormously. The stat I always return to, or the fact that was returned to, is that we had single-digits percentage of Russian gas in the British system at the time that Russia invaded Ukraine, but we faced 100% of the impact that that had on the global gas price – and the global gas price spiked to an extraordinary degree after that. I’m afraid that is a pattern that is repeated consistently.

We’ve had oil crises in the past and we’ve had gas crises – and every time we are burned by it. The best possible insulation and insurance from that is to not have that problem in the first place. What we are about is ensuring that when that situation – I say when – that situation arises again, who knows what will drive it in the future? But you cannot steer geopolitics from here in the UK. What you can do is insulate yourself from it the next time it happens.

Clean power is largely about ensuring that in the future, the power price is not going to be so impacted by that spike in prices. Sure, there’s lots of things you could do to make it [electricity] cheaper, but these are pretty marginal things, in terms of the overall mission of getting gas out of the system in the first place.

CB: Another opposition party, Reform, thinks that net-zero is the whole problem with high electricity prices. They’re pledging to, if they get into government, to rip up existing contracts with renewables. To what extent do you think the work that you’re doing now in mission control is locking in progress that will be very difficult to unpick?

CS: Well, it’s important to say that we do not start from the position that we’re trying to lock in something that a future government would find difficult to unwind. I mean, this is just straightforwardly an infrastructure challenge, in terms of what…we would like to see built and need to see built. And yes, I think it will be difficult to unwind that, because these are projects we want to actually have in construction.

We don’t want to find ourselves – ever – in the future, in the kind of circumstance that you might see in the US, where projects are being cancelled so late that actually they end up in the courts. So look, it’s not my job to advise the Reform Party and what their policy is on this. But all I would say is that all this sort of threatening stuff, that is about ripping up existing contracts, has a much bigger impact than just the energy transition. This has always been a country that respects those legacy contracts. I’m happy that it would be very difficult to change those contracts, because we [the government] are not a counterparty to those contracts. The Low Carbon Contracts Company was set up for this purpose. These are private-law contracts between developers and the LCCC. It would be extraordinarily difficult to step into that – you probably would need to take extraordinary measures to do so – and to what end?

I suppose my objective is simply to get stuff built and, in so doing, to demonstrate the value of those things, even if you don’t care about climate change. In the end, we’re bringing all sorts of benefits to the country that go beyond the climate here. The jobs that go with that transition, [the] investment that comes with that and, of course, the energy security that we’re buying ourselves by having all of this domestic supply. It’s hard to argue that that is bad for the country. It seems to me that that, inevitably, will mean that we will lock in those benefits into the future, with the clean power mission.

CB: One of the things that’s been happening in the last few years is that solar continues this kind of onward march of getting cheaper and cheaper over time, but things like offshore wind, in particular – but arguably also gas power [and] other forms of generation – have been getting more expensive, due to supply chain challenges and so on. Do you think that means the UK has taken the wrong bet by putting offshore wind at the heart of its plans?

CS: I mean, latitude matters. It is definitely true that, were we in the sun-belt latitude of the world, solar would be the thing that we’d be pursuing. But we are blessed in having high wind speeds, relatively shallow waters and a pretty important requirement for extra energy when it’s cold over the winter. And all that stuff coincides quite nicely with wind – and in particular, offshore wind. So I think our competitive advantage is to develop that. There are plenty of places, particularly in the northern hemisphere, [but] also potentially places like Japan down in Asia, where wind will be competitive.

The long future of this is, I tend to think, in terms of where we’re heading, we are going to head eventually – ultimately – to a world where the wholesale price of this stuff is going to be negligible, whether it’s solar or wind. Actually, the competitive challenge of it being slightly more expensive to have wind rather than solar is not going to be a major factor for us. But we can’t move the position of this country – and therefore we should exploit the resources that we have. I think it’s also true that there’s room in the mix for more nuclear – and yes, we have solar capacity, particularly in the south of the country, that we want to see exploited as well.

Bring it all together, that idea of a renewables-led system, with nuclear on the horizon, is just so clearly the obvious thing to do. I don’t really know what the alternative would be for us if we weren’t pursuing it. It’s a very obvious thing to do. Solar has this astonishing collapse in price over time. We’re in a period, actually, where [solar’s] going slightly more expensive at the moment because some of the components, like silver, for example, are becoming more expensive. So, a few blips on the way, but the long-term journey is still that it will continue to fall in price.

We want to get wind back on that track. The only way that happens and the only way that we get back on the cost-saving trajectory is by continuing to deploy and seeing deployment in other territories as well. We are a big part of that story. The big auction that we had recently for offshore wind [was a] huge success for us, that’s been noticed in other parts of the world. We had the North Sea summit, for example, in Hamburg.

Just a few weeks ago, we were the talk of the town, because we have, I think, righted the ship on the story of offshore wind. That’s going to give investors confidence. Hopefully, we can get those technologies back on a downward cost curve again and allow into the mix some of the more nascent technologies there, particularly floating offshore wind. We’ve got a big role to do some of that, but it’s all good for this country and any other country that finds itself in a similar latitude.

CB: The UK strategy is – you mentioned this already – it’s increasingly all about electrification. Electrotech, as it’s being called, solar, batteries, EVs, renewables. Do you think that that is genuinely a recipe for energy security, or are we simply trading reliance on imported fossil fuels for reliance on imports that are linked to China?

CS: So there’s a lot in that question. I mean, the first thing to say, I’ve been one of the people that’s been talking about electrostates. Colleagues use the term electrotech interchangeably, essentially, but the electrostates idea is basically about two things. These are the countries of the world that are deploying renewables, because they are cheap, and then deploying electrified technologies that use the renewable power, especially using it flexibly when it’s available. The combination of those two things is what makes an electrostate.

Yes, that’s quite good for the climate – and that’s obviously where I’ve been most interested in it. It’s also extraordinarily good for productivity, because you’re not wasting energy. Fossil fuels bring a huge amount of waste – almost two-thirds, perhaps, of fossil-fuel energy is wasted through the lost heat that comes from burning it. You don’t get that with electrotech. So there’s lots of good, solid productivity and efficiency reasons to want to have an electrostate and a system that is based – an economy that’s based – more on electrotech.

You’ve come now to the most interesting thing, which is inherent in your question, which is, are we trading a dependency on increasingly imported fossil fuels for a dependency on imported tech? And I do think that is something that we should think about. I think underneath that, there are other issues playing out, like, for example, the mineral supply chains that sit in those technologies.

I think we in this country need to accept that some of that will be imported, but we should think very carefully about which bits of that supply chain we want to host and really go at that, as part of this story. So I want us to be an electrostate. I want to see us adopt electrotech. I also want us to own a large part of the supply chain.

Now, offshore wind is an obvious example of that. So we would like to see the blade manufacturing happening here, but also the nacelles and the towers. It’s perfectly legitimate for us to go for that. That’s the story of our ports and our manufacturing facilities. I think it is also true that we should try and bring battery manufacturing to the UK. It’s a sensible thing to have production of batteries in this territory. Yes, we wouldn’t sew up the entire supply chain, but that is something we should be going for.

Then there are other bits to this, including things like control systems and the components that are needed in the power system, where we have real assets and strength, and we want to have those bits of the supply chain here too. So, you know, we’re in a globalised world. I don’t think it’s ever going to be the case that we can, for example, avoid the Chinese interaction. I don’t think that should be our objective at all, but I think it’s really important that our industrial strategy is cute about which bits of that supply chain it wants to see here and that is what you see in our industrial strategy.

So as we get into the next phase of the clean power mission, electrification and the industrial strategy that sits alongside that, I think, probably takes on more and more importance.

CB: I want to pan out a little bit now and you obviously were very focused, in your previous role, on the Climate Change Act. There’s been quite a lot of suggestions – particularly from some opposition politicians – that the Climate Change Act has become a bit of a straitjacket for policymaking. Do you think that there’s any truth in that and is it time for a different approach?

CS: We should always remember what the Climate Change Act is for. It was passed in 2008. It was not, I think, intended to be this sort of originator of the government’s economic plans. It is there to act as a sort of guardrail, within which governments of any colour should make their plans for the economy and for broader society and for industry and for the energy sector and every other sector within it. I think to date, it’s done an extraordinarily good job of that. It points you towards a future. A lot of the criticism of the Climate Change Act, I find completely…crazy. It has not acted as a straitjacket. It has not restricted economic growth. The problems and woes of this country, in terms of the cost of energy, are due to fossil fuels, not due to the Climate Change Act.

But I think it is also true to say that as we get further along the emissions trajectory that we need to follow in the Climate Change Act, it clearly gets harder. And you know, the Act was designed to guide that too. So what it’s saying to us now is that you have to make the preparations for the tougher emissions targets that are coming, and that is largely about getting the infrastructure in place that will guide us to that. If you do that now, it’s actually quite an easy glide path into carbon budgets five and six and seven. If you don’t, it gets harder, and you then need to look to some more exotic stuff to believe that you’re going to hit those targets.

I think we’ve got plenty of scope for the Climate Change Act still to play the role of providing the guardrails, but it doesn’t need to define this government’s industrial policy or economic policy – and neither does it. It should shape it – and I think the other thing to say about the Climate Change Act is it has definitely shown its worth on the international stage. It brings us – obviously – influence in the climate debate. But it has also kept us on the straight and narrow in a host of other areas too, not least the energy sector.

We have shown how it is possible to direct decarbonisation of energy, while seeing the benefits of all that and jobs that go with it, and investment that comes with it, probably more so than any other country, actually. So a Western democracy that’s really going to follow the rules has seen the benefits from it. I want to see that kind of strategy, of course, in the power sector, but I want to see us direct that towards transport, towards buildings and especially towards the industries that we have here. Reshoring industries, because we are a place that’s got this cheap, clean energy, is absolutely the endpoint for all of this.

So I’m not worried about the Climate Change Act, as long as we follow the implications of what it’s there for. You know, we’ve got to get our house in order now and get those infrastructure investments in place and in the spending review just last year, you could see the provision that was made for that – Ed Miliband [was] extraordinarily successful in securing the deal that he needed. This year, of course, we will have to see the next carbon budget legislated. That’s a lot easier when you’ve got plans that point us in the right direction towards those budgets.

CB: I wanted to ask about misinformation, which seems to be an increasingly big feature of the media and social-media environment. Do you think that’s a particular problem for climate change? Any reflections on what’s been happening?

CS: I suppose I don’t know if it’s a particular problem for climate change, but I know that it is a problem for climate change. There may well be similar campaigns and misinformation on other topics. I’m not so familiar with them. But it’s a huge frustration that it’s become as prevalent and as obvious as it is now. I mean, I used to love Twitter. You and I would interact on Twitter. I would interact with other commentators on Twitter and interact with real people on Twitter…But that’s one of the great shames, is that platform has been lost to me now – and one of the reasons for that is it’s been engulfed by this misinformation. It is very difficult to see a way back from that.

Actually, I don’t know quite what leads it to be such a big issue, but I think you have to acknowledge that climate change and probably net-zero have taken on a role in the “culture wars” that they didn’t previously have, or if they did, it wasn’t as prevalent as it is now. That is what feeds a lot of this stuff. It’s quite interesting doing a job like this now [within government], because when we were at the Climate Change Committee, I felt this stuff more acutely. It was quite raw. If someone made a real, you know, crazy assertion about something. Here – maybe it’s the size of the machine around government – it causes you to be slightly more insulated from it.

It’s been good for me, actually, to do that, because it means you just get your head down and get on with it, because you know, at the end of it, you’re doing the right thing. I think in the end, that’s how you win the arguments. Actually, it’s not to shoot down every assertion that you know to be false. It’s just to get on with trying to do this thing, to demonstrate to people that there’s a better way to go about this. That is largely what we’ve been trying to do with the clean-power mission, is try not to be too buffeted by that stuff, but actually spend, especially the last two years – it’s hard graft right – putting in place the right conditions. Hopefully now, we’re in a period where you’re going to start to see the benefits of that.

CB: Final question before you go. Just stepping back to the big picture, how optimistic do you feel – in this world of geopolitical uncertainty – about the UK’s net-zero target and global efforts to avoid dangerous climate change?

CS: I’m going to be very honest with you, it’s been tough, right? There was a different period in the discussion of climate when I was very fortunate to be at the Climate Change Committee and there was huge interest globally – and especially in the UK – on more ambition. It did feel that we were really motoring over that period. Some of the things that have happened in the last few years have been hard to swallow.

[It’s] quite interesting doing what I do now, though, in a government that has stayed committed to what needs to be done in the face of a lot of things – and in particular the Clean Power mission, which has acted as sort of North Star for a lot of this. It’s great – you see the benefit of not overreacting to some of that shift in opinion around you, [which] is that you can really get on with something.

We talked earlier about the industry reaction to what we’re trying to do on clean power. You do see this virtuous circle of government staying close to its commitments and the private sector responding and a good consumer impact, if you collectively do that well. I think the net-zero target implies doing more of that. Yes, in the energy system, but also in the transport system and in the agriculture system and in the built environment. There’s so much more of this still to come.

The net-zero target itself, I think, we are getting beyond a period where net-zero has a slogan value. I think it’s probably moved back to being what it always should have been, really, which is a scientific target – and in this country, a statutory target that guides activity.

But I don’t want to gloss over the geopolitical stuff, because it’s striking how much it’s shifted, not least because of the US and its attitudes towards climate. It is slightly weird then to say that, well, that has happened at a time when every day, almost, the evidence is there that the cleaner alternative is the way that the world is heading.

As we talk today, there’s the emission stats from China, which do seem to indicate that we’re getting close to two years of falls in carbon dioxide emissions from China. That’s happening at a time when their energy demand is increasing and their economy is growing. That points to a change, that we are seeing now the impact of these cleaner technologies [being] rolled out. So I suppose, in that world, that’s what I go back to, in a world where the discussion of climate change is definitely harder right now – no doubt – and the multilateral approach to that has frayed at the edges, with the US departing from the Paris Agreement. I wish that hadn’t happened, but the economics of the cleaner alternative that we’re building just get better and better over time – and it’s obvious that that’s the way you should head.

Pete Betts, who I knew very well, was for a long time, the head of the whole climate effort – when it came to the multilateral discussion on climate. I always remember he said to me – and this was before he was diagnosed and sadly died – he said look, it’s all heading in one direction, this stuff, you’ve just got to keep remembering that. The COP, which is often the kind of touch point for this – I know you go every year, Simon – you know, he said, I always remember Pete said this, “you’ve got to see the movie, not the scene”. The movie is that things are heading in one direction, towards something cleaner. Good luck if you think you can avoid that – King Canute standing, trying to make the waves stop, the waves lapping over him. But the scene is often the thing that we talk about, if it’s the COP or the latest pronouncement from the US on the Paris Agreement. These are disappointing scenes in that movie, but the movie still ends in the right place, it seems to me, so we’ve got to stay focused on that ending.

CB: Brilliant, thanks very much, Chris.

The post Chris Stark: The economics of clean energy ‘just get better and better’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Chris Stark: The economics of clean energy ‘just get better and better’

It is well understood that human-caused climate change is causing sea levels to rise around the world.

Since 1901, global sea levels have risen by at least 20cm – accelerating from around 1mm a year for much of the 20th century to 4mm a year over 2006-18. 

Sea level rise has significant environmental and social consequences, including coastal erosion, damage to buildings and transport infrastructure, loss of livelihoods and ecosystems.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said it is “virtually certain” that sea level will continue to rise during the current century and beyond.

But what is less clear is exactly how quickly sea levels could climb over the coming decades.

This is largely due to challenges in calculating the rate at which land ice in Antarctica – the world’s largest store of frozen freshwater – could melt.

In this article, we unpack some of the reasons why projecting the speed and scale of future sea level rise is difficult.

Drivers of sea level rise

There are three principal components of sea level rise.

First, as the ocean warms, water expands. This process is known as thermal expansion, a comparatively straightforward physical process. 

Second, more water gets added to the oceans when the ice contained in glaciers and ice sheets on land melts and flows into the sea.

Third, changes in rainfall and evaporation – as well as the extraction of groundwater for drinking and irrigation, drainage of wetlands and construction of reservoirs – affect how much water is stored on land.

In its sixth assessment cycle (AR6), the IPCC noted that thermal expansion and melting land ice contributed almost equally to sea level rise over the past century. Changes in land water storage, on the other hand, played a minor role. 

However, the balance between these three drivers is shifting.

The IPCC projects that the contribution of melting land ice – already the largest contributor to sea level rise – will increase over the coming decade as the world continues to warm. 

The lion’s share of the Earth’s remaining land ice – 88% – is in Antarctica, with Greenland accounting for almost all of the rest. (Mountain glaciers in the Himalaya, Alps and other regions collectively account for less than 1% of total land ice.)

However, it is difficult to project exactly how much Antarctic ice will make its way into the sea between now and 2100.

As a result, IPCC projections cover a large range of outcomes for future sea level rise.

In AR6, the IPCC said sea levels would “likely” be between 44-76cm higher by 2100 than the 1995-2014 average under a medium-emissions scenario. However, it noted that sea level rise above this range could not be ruled out due to “deep uncertainty linked to ice sheet processes”.

The chart below illustrates the wide range of sea level rise projected by the IPCC under different warming scenarios (coloured lines) as well as a possible – but unlikely – worst-case scenario (dotted line).

The shaded areas represent the “likely range” of sea level rise under each warming scenario, calculated by analysing processes that are already well understood. The worst-case scenario dotted line represents a future where various poorly understood processes combine to lead to a very rapid increase in sea levels.

The graph shows that sea level rise increases with warming – and would climb most sharply under the “low-likelihood, high-impact” pathway.

Retreat of glacier grounding lines

In Antarctica, the melting of ice on the surface of glaciers is limited. In many locations, warmer temperatures are leading to increases in snowfall and greater snow accumulation, which means the surface of the ice is continuously gaining mass.

Most of Antarctica’s contribution to global sea level rise is, therefore, not linked to ice melt at the surface. Instead, it occurs when giant glaciers push from land into the sea, propelled downhill by gravity and their own immense weight.

These huge masses of ice first grind downhill across the land and then along the seafloor. Eventually, they detach from the bedrock and start to float.

These floating ice shelves then largely melt from below, as warm ocean water intrudes into cavities on its underside. This is known as “basal melting”.

The boundary between grounded and floating ice is known as the “grounding line”.

In many regions of Antarctica, grounding lines typically sit at the high point of the bedrock, with the ice sheet deepening inland. This is illustrated in the graphic below.

When a grounding line is at a high point of the bedrock, it acts as a block which limits the area of ice exposed to basal melting.

However, if the grounding line retreats further inland, warm water could “spill” over the high point in the bedrock and carve out large cavities below the ice. This could dramatically accelerate the retreat of grounding lines further inland across Antarctica.

There is evidence to suggest that the retreat of grounding lines might cause a runaway effect, in which each successive retreat causes the ice behind the line to detach from the land even more quickly.

Recent climate modelling suggests that many grounding lines are not yet in runaway retreat – but some regions of Antarctica are close enough to thresholds that tiny increases in basal melting push model runs toward very different outcomes. 

Whether – and to what extent – grounding lines might retreat will depend on a wide range of factors, including the exact shape of the bedrock beneath the ice. However, the bedrock on the coast of Antarctica has not yet been precisely mapped in many places.

Ice shelves

Once Antarctic ice detaches from the seabed, it floats on the ocean surface. These floating ice shelves slow the flow of ice from land towards the sea, acting as a brake as they wedge between headlands and little hills on the seafloor.

If these ice shelves break apart, the flow of glaciers towards the sea can accelerate.

The image below on the left shows a present-day ice shelf that is pinned in place by bedrock, which slows the flow of the ice into the sea.

The image on the right shows a future scenario in which ocean water continues to intrude under the ice, accelerating basal melting on the underside of the floating ice until it completely detaches from the “pinning point” that had previously held it in place.

In this scenario, the bedrock is no longer acting as a break on glaciers pushing to the sea and the ice shelf starts flowing into the sea more quickly and begins breaking up. Ice masses inland then begin to push more rapidly towards the sea.

This dynamic was directly observed during the collapse of the Larsen-B ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula in 2002, which led to accelerated glacial ice flow and is believed to have contributed to a dramatic glacial retreat two decades later.

However, the factors affecting the stability of the floating ice shelves around Antarctica’s coast are complex. The strength of ice shelves depends on their thickness, how and where they are pinned to the seafloor, how cracks grow, as well as air and sea temperatures and levels of snow and rainfall. For example, meltwater at the surface can lever cracks further apart, in a process known as hydrofracturing. 

A 2024 review of the stability of ice shelves found big gaps in scientific understanding of these processes. There is currently no scientific consensus on how rapidly various ice shelves might collapse – the pace is likely to vary greatly from one ice shelf to the next.

Ice-cliff collapse

If, and when, ice shelves collapse and drift away from the coast, they will expose the towering ice cliffs that loom behind them directly to the sea. These ice cliffs can be more than 100 metres tall.

This exposure could potentially lead to those cliffs to become structurally unstable and collapse in a runaway process – further accelerating the advance of the glaciers pushing towards the sea. 

The images below illustrate how such a collapse might unfold. In the top image, a floating ice shelf buttresses the ice masses behind it. In the middle image, the ice shelf has largely broken apart and melted into the sea. In the bottom image, the ice shelf has completely disappeared, leaving a steep wall of ice towering over the sea. At this point, the exposed cliffs might collapse and crash into the water below.

Researchers are still debating whether or not this “marine ice cliff instability” is likely to happen this century.

Modelling ocean dynamics

The speed at which grounding lines retreat, ice shelves collapse and ice cliffs cascade into the sea partially depends on complex ocean dynamics.

The temperature and speed of water intrusion underneath the ice depends on multiple factors, including ocean currents, winds, sea ice, underwater ridges and eddies. These factors vary from one location to the next and can vary by season and by year. 

Once water reaches a given cavity, the ways in which turbulent flows and fresh meltwater plumes meet the ice can significantly affect melt levels – further complicating the picture.

In other words, predicting future melt depends on models that integrate macro-level ocean circulation with local-level turbulence. This remains a major modelling challenge that, despite ongoing progress, is unlikely to be conclusively resolved any time soon. 

Planning for future sea level rise

Scientists agree that human-caused climate change is causing sea levels to rise and that the oceans will continue to rise during the current century and far beyond.

However, the combination of the complexity of modelling ice-ocean interactions and the threat of potential runaway processes means that, for the foreseeable future, there is considerable uncertainty about the magnitude of future sea level rise.

(While this article focuses on Antarctica, it is worth noting that Greenland’s contribution to future sea level rise is also highly uncertain.)

To complicate matters further, the ocean does not rise like water in a bathtub, creeping up equally on all sides. Instead the Earth’s surface is highly dynamic.

For example, during the last ice age, the immense mass of the glaciers that covered much of northern Europe pressed the Earth’s surface downwards. Even though most of that ice disappeared millennia ago, much of Scandinavia is still rebounding today, causing the land to rise gradually. 

In contrast, the city of Jakarta in Indonesia is sinking at a rapid pace of 10cm per year due to sprawling urbanisation and extraction of groundwater for household and industrial uses. That rate may increase or decrease over the coming decades, depending on urban planning and water management decisions. 

This mix of natural and human-driven factors means that, even if researchers could perfectly predict average global sea level rise, calculating how much the sea will rise in any given location will remain challenging. 

Another key unknown is around future levels of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions which drive climate change. 

The scientific community is working to better understand the dynamics driving sea level rise and improve predictions, including through Antarctic sea bed mapping, field observations and improved models. Those advances in knowledge will not erase uncertainty, but they could reduce the range of possible outcomes. 

Nevertheless, while that range may narrow, it will not completely disappear.

Plans drawn up by policymakers and engineers to prepare society for future sea level rise should never be based on a single point estimate.

Instead, they should take into account a range of possible “likely” outcomes – and include contingency plans for less likely, but entirely possible, scenarios in which the oceans rise far faster than currently expected.

The post Guest post: The challenges in projecting future global sea levels appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Guest post: The challenges in projecting future global sea levels

On 12 February, US president Donald Trump revoked the “endangerment finding”, the bedrock of federal climate policy.

The 2009 finding concluded that six key greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide (CO2), were a threat to human health – triggering a legal requirement to regulate them.

It has been key to the rollout of policies such as federal emission standards for vehicles, power plants, factories and other sources.

Speaking at the White House, US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Lee Zeldin claimed that the “elimination” of the endangerment finding would save “trillions”.

The revocation is expected to face multiple legal challenges, but, if it succeeds, it is expected to have a “sweeping” impact on federal emissions regulations for many years.

Nevertheless, US emissions are expected to continue falling, albeit at a slower pace.

Carbon Brief takes a look at what the endangerment finding was, how it has shaped US climate policy in the past and what its repeal could mean for action in the future.

• What is the ‘endangerment finding’?
• How has it shaped federal climate policy?
• How is the finding being repealed and will it face legal challenge?
• What does this mean for federal efforts to address climate change?
• What has the reaction been?
• What will the repeal mean for US emissions?

What is the ‘endangerment finding’?

The challenges of passing climate legislation in the US have meant that the federal government has often turned instead to regulations – principally, under the 1970 Clean Air Act.

The act requires the EPA to regulate pollutants, if they are found to pose a danger to public health and the environment.

In a 2007 legal case known as Massachusetts vs EPA, the Supreme Court ruled that greenhouse gases qualify as pollutants under the Clean Air Act. It also directed the EPA to determine whether these gases posed a threat to human health.

The 2009 “endangerment finding” was the result of this process and found that greenhouse gas emissions do indeed pose such a threat. Subsequently, it has underpinned federal emissions regulations for more than 15 years.

In developing the endangerment finding, the EPA pulled together evidence from its own experts, the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and the wider scientific community.

On 7 December 2009, it concluded that US greenhouse gas emissions “in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations”.

In particular, the finding highlighted six “well-mixed” greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide (CO2); methane (CH4); nitrous oxide (N2O); hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs); perfluorocarbons (PFCs); and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6).

A second part of the finding stated that new vehicles contribute to the greenhouse gas pollution that endangers public health and welfare, opening the door to these emissions being regulated.

At the time, the EPA noted that, while the finding itself does not impose any requirements on industry or other entities, “this action was a prerequisite for implementing greenhouse gas emissions standards for vehicles and other sectors”.

On 15 December 2009, the finding was published in the federal register – the official record of US federal legislation – and the final rule came into effect on 14 January 2010.

At the time, then-EPA administrator Lisa Jackson said in a statement:

“This finding confirms that greenhouse gas pollution is a serious problem now and for future generations. Fortunately, it follows President [Barack] Obama’s call for a low-carbon economy and strong leadership in Congress on clean energy and climate legislation.

“This pollution problem has a solution – one that will create millions of green jobs and end our country’s dependence on foreign oil.”

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How has it shaped federal climate policy?

The endangerment finding originated from a part of the Clean Air Act regulating emissions from new vehicles and so it was first applied in that sector.

However, it came to underpin greenhouse gas emission regulation across a range of sectors.

In May 2010, shortly after the Obama EPA finalised the finding, it was used to set the country’s first-ever limits on greenhouse gas emissions from light-duty engines in motor vehicles.

The following year, the EPA also released emissions standards for heavy-duty vehicles and engines.

However, findings made under one part of the Clean Air Act can also be applied to other articles of the law. David Widawsky, director of the US programme at the World Resources Institute (WRI), tells Carbon Brief:

“You can take that finding – and that scientific basis and evidence – and apply it in other instances where air pollutants are subject or required to be regulated under the Clean Air Act or other statutes.

“Revoking the endangerment finding then creates a thread that can be pulled out of not just vehicles, but a whole lot of other [sources].”

Since being entered into the federal register, the endangerment finding has also been applied to stationary sources of emissions, such as fossil-fuelled power plants and factories, as well as an expanded range of non-stationary emissions sources, including aviation.

(In fact, the EPA is compelled to regulate emissions of a pollutant – such as CO2 as identified in the endangerment finding – from stationary sources, once it has been regulated anywhere else under the Clean Air Act.)

In 2015, the EPA finalised its guidance on regulating emissions from fossil-fuelled power plants. These performance standards applied to newly constructed plants, as well as those that underwent major modifications.

This ruling noted that “because the EPA is not listing a new source category in this rule, the EPA is not required to make a new endangerment finding…in order to establish standards of performance for the CO2”.

The following year, the agency established rules on methane emissions from oil and gas sources, including wells and processing plants. Again, this was based on the 2009 finding.

The 2016 aircraft endangerment finding also explicitly references the vehicle-emissions endangerment finding. That rule says that the “body of scientific evidence amassed in the record for the 2009 endangerment finding also compellingly supports an endangerment finding” for aircraft.

The endangerment finding has also played a critical role in shaping the trajectory of climate litigation in the US.

In a 2011 case, American Electric Power Co. vs Connecticut, the Supreme Court unanimously found that, because greenhouse gas emissions were already regulated by the EPA under the Clean Air Act, companies could not be sued under federal common law over their greenhouse gas emissions.

Widawsky tells Carbon Brief that repealing the endangerment finding therefore “opens the door” to climate litigation of other kinds:

“When plaintiffs would introduce litigation in federal courts, the answer or the courts would find that EPA is ‘handling it’ and there’s not necessarily a basis for federal litigation. By removing the endangerment finding…it actually opens the door to the question – not necessarily successful litigation – and the courts will make that determination.”

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How is the finding being repealed and will it face legal challenge?

The official revocation of the endangerment finding is yet to be posted to the federal register. It will be effective 60 days after the text is published in the journal.

It is set to face no shortage of legal challenges. The state of California has “vowed” to sue, as have a number of environmental groups, including Sierra Club, Earthjustice and the National Resources Defense Council.

Dena Adler, an adjunct professor of law at New York University School of Law, tells Carbon Brief there are “significant legal and analytical vulnerabilities” in the EPA’s ruling. She explains:

“This repeal will only stick if it can survive legal challenge in the courts. But it could take months, if not years, to get a final judicial decision.”

At the heart of the federal agency’s argument is that it claims to lack the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions in response to “global climate change concerns” under the Clean Air Act.

In the ruling, the EPA says the section of the Act focused on vehicle emissions is “best read” as authorising the agency to regulate air pollution that harms the public through “local or regional exposure” – for instance, smog or acid rain – but not pollution from “well-mixed” greenhouse gases that, it claims, “impact public health and welfare only indirectly”.

This distinction directly contradicts the landmark 2007 Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts vs EPA. (See: What is the ‘endangerment finding’?)

The EPA’s case also rests on an argument that the agency violated the “major questions doctrine” when it started regulating greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles.

This legal principle holds that federal agencies need explicit authorisation from Congress to press ahead with actions in certain “extraordinary” cases.

In a policy brief in January, legal experts from New York University School of Law’s Institute of Policy Integrity argued that the “major questions doctrine” argument “fails for several reasons”.

Regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act is “neither unheralded nor transformative” – both of which are needed for the legal principle to apply, the lawyers said.

Furthermore, the policy brief noted that – even if the doctrine were triggered – the Clean Air Act does, in fact, supply the EPA with the “clear authority” required.

Mark Drajem, director of public affairs at NRDC, says the endangerment finding has been “firmly established in the courts”. He tells Carbon Brief:

“In 2007, the Supreme Court directed EPA to look at the science and determine if greenhouse gases pose a risk to human health and welfare. EPA did that in 2009 and federal courts rejected a challenge to that in 2012.

“Since then, the Supreme Court has considered EPA’s greenhouse gas regulations three separate times and never questioned whether it has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases. It has only ruled on how it can regulate that pollution.” 

However, experts have noted that the Trump administration is banking on legal challenges making their way to the Supreme Court – and the now conservative-leaning bench then upholding the repeal of the endangerment finding.

Elsewhere, the EPA’s new ruling argues that regulating emissions from vehicles has “no material impact on global climate change concerns…much less the adverse public health or welfare impacts attributed to such global climate trends”.

“Climate impact modelling”, it continues, shows that “even the complete elimination of all greenhouse gas emissions” of vehicles in the US would have impacts that fall “within the standard margin of error” for global temperature and sea level rise.

In this context, it argues, regulations on emissions are “futile”.

(The US is more historically responsible for climate change than any other country. In its 2022 sixth assessment report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that further delaying action to cut emissions would “miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all”.)

However, the final rule stops short of attempting to justify the plans by disputing the scientific basis for climate change.

Notably, the EPA has abandoned plans to rely on the findings of a controversial climate science report commissioned by the Department of Energy (DoE) last year.

This is a marked departure from the draft ruling, published in August, which argued there were “significant questions and ambiguities presented by both the observable realities of the past nearly two decades and the recent findings of the scientific community, including those summarised in the draft CWG [‘climate working group’] report”.

The CWG report – written by five researchers known for rejecting the scientific consensus on human influence on global warming – faced significant criticism for inaccurate conclusions and a flawed review process. (Carbon Brief’s factcheck found more than 100 misleading or false statements in the report.)

A judge ruled in January that the DoE had broken the law when energy secretary Chris Wright “hand-picked five researchers who reject the scientific consensus on climate change to work in secret on a sweeping government report on global warming”, according to the New York Times.

In a press release in July, the EPA said “updated studies and information” set out in the CWG report would serve to “challenge the assumptions” of the 2009 finding.

But, in the footnotes to its final ruling, the EPA notes it is not relying on the report for “any aspect of this final action” in light of “concerns raised by some commenters”.

Legal experts have argued that the pivot away from arguments undermining climate science is designed with future legal battles over the attempted repeal in mind.

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What does this mean for federal efforts to address climate change?

As mentioned above, a number of groups have already filed legal actions against the Trump administration’s move to repeal the endangerment finding – leaving the future uncertain.

However, if the repeal does survive legal challenges, it would have far-reaching implications for federal efforts to address greenhouse gas emissions, experts say.

In a blog post, the WRI’s Widawsky said that the repeal would have a “sweeping” impact on federal emissions regulations for cars, coal-fired power stations and gas power plants, adding:

“In practical terms, without the endangerment finding, regulating greenhouse gas emissions is no longer a legal requirement. The science hasn’t changed, but the obligation to act on it has been removed.”

Speaking to Carbon Brief, Widawsky adds that, despite this large immediate impact, there are “a lot of mechanisms” future US administrations might be able to pursue if they wanted to reinstate the federal government’s obligation to address greenhouse gas emissions:

“Probably the most direct way – rather than talk about ‘pollutants’, in general, and the EPA, say, making a science-specific finding for that pollutant – [is] for Congress simply to declare a particular pollutant to be a hazard for human health and welfare. [This] has been done in other instances.”

If federal efforts to address greenhouse gas emissions decline, there will likely still be attempts to regulate at the state level.

Previous analysis from the University of Oxford noted that, despite a walkback on federal climate policy in Trump’s second presidential term, 19 US states – covering nearly half of the country’s population – remain committed to net-zero targets.

Widawksy tells Carbon Brief that it is possible that states may be able to leverage legislation, including the Clean Air Act, to enact regulations to address emissions at the state level.

However, in some cases, states may be prevented from doing so by “preemption”, a US legal doctrine where higher-level federal laws override lower-level state laws, he adds:

“There are a whole lot of other sections of the Clean Air Act that may either inhibit that kind of ability for states to act through preemption or allow for that to happen.”

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What has the reaction been?

The Trump administration’s decision has received widespread global condemnation, although it has been celebrated by some right-wing newspapers, politicians and commentators.

In the US, former US president Barack Obama said on Twitter that the move will leave Americans “less safe, less healthy and less able to fight climate change – all so the fossil-fuel industry can make even more money”.

Similarly, California governor Gavin Newsom called the decision “reckless”, arguing that it will lead to “more deadly wildfires, more extreme heat deaths, more climate-driven floods and droughts and greater threats to communities nationwide”.

Former US secretary of state and climate envoy John Kerry called the decision “un-American”, according to a story on the frontpage of the Guardian. He continued:

“[It] takes Orwellian governance to new heights and invites enormous damage to people and property around the world.”

An editorial in the Guardian dubbed the repeal as “just one part of Trump’s assault on environmental controls and promotion of fossil fuels”, but added that it “may be his most consequential”.

Similarly, an editorial in the Hindu said that Trump is “trying to turn back the clock on environmental issues”.

In China, state-run news agency Xinhua published a cartoon depicting Uncle Sam attempting to turn an ageing car, marked “US climate policy”, away from the road marked “green development”, back towards a city engulfed in flames and pollution that swells towards dark clouds labelled “greenhouse gas catastrophe”.

Conversely, Trump described the finding as “the legal foundation for the green new scam”, which he claimed “the Obama and Biden administration used to destroy countless jobs”.

Similarly, Al Jazeera reported that EPA administrator Zeldin said the endangerment finding “led to trillions of dollars in regulations that strangled entire sectors of the US economy, including the American auto industry”. The outlet quoted him saying:

“The Obama and Biden administrations used it to steamroll into existence a left-wing wish list of costly climate policies, electric vehicle mandates and other requirements that assaulted consumer choice and affordability.”

An editorial in the Washington Post also praises the move, saying “it’s about time” that the endangerment finding was revoked. It argued – without evidence – that the benefits of regulating emissions are “modest” and that “free-market-driven innovation has done more to combat climate change than regulatory power grabs like the ‘endangerment finding’ ever did”.

The Heritage Foundation – the climate-sceptic US lobby group that published the influential “Project 2025” document before Trump took office – has also celebrated the decision.

Time reported that the group previously criticised the endangerment finding, saying that it was used to “justify sweeping restrictions on CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions across the economy, imposing huge costs”. The magazine added that Project 2025 laid out plans to “establish a system, with an appropriate deadline, to update the 2009 endangerment finding”.

Climate scientists have also weighed in on the administration’s repeal efforts. Prof Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University in College Station, argued that there is “no legitimate scientific rationale” for the EPA decision.

Similarly, Dr Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, said in a statement that, since the establishment of the 2009 endangerment finding, the evidence showing greenhouse gases pose a threat to human health and the environment “has only grown stronger”.

Dr Gretchen Goldman, president and CEO of the Union of Concerned Scientists and a former White House official, gave a statement, arguing that “ramming through this unlawful, destructive action at the behest of polluters is an obvious example of what happens when a corrupt administration and fossil fuel interests are allowed to run amok”.

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Prof Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, and Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute, wrote that Trump is “slowing climate progress”, but that “it won’t put a stop to global climate action”. They added:

“The rest of the world is moving on and thanks to Trump’s ridiculous insistence that climate change is a ‘hoax’, the US now stands to lose out in the great economic revolution of the modern era – the clean-energy transition.”

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What will the repeal mean for US emissions?

Federal regulations and standards underpinned by the endangerment finding have been at the heart of US government plans to reduce the nation’s emissions.

For example, NRDC analysis of EPA data suggests that Biden-era vehicle standards, combined with other policies to boost electric cars, were set to avoid nearly 8bn tonnes of CO2 equivalent (GtCO2e) over the next three decades.

By removing the legal requirement to regulate greenhouse gases at a federal level from such high-emitting sectors, the EPA could instead be driving higher emissions.

Nevertheless, some climate experts argue that the repeal is more of a “symbolic” action and that EPA regulations have not historically been the main drivers of US emissions cuts.

Rhodium Group analysis last year estimated the impact of the EPA removing 31 regulatory policies, including the endangerment finding and “actions that rely on that finding”. Most of these had already been proposed for repeal independently by the Trump administration.

Ben King, the organisation’s climate and energy director, tells Carbon Brief this “has the same effect on the system as repealing the endangerment finding”.

The Rhodium Group concluded that, in this scenario, emissions would continue falling to 26-35% below 2005 levels by 2035, as the chart below shows. If the regulations remained in place, it estimated that emissions would fall faster, by around 32-44%.

(Notably, neither of these scenarios would be in line with the Biden administration’s international climate pledge, which was a 61-66% reduction by 2035).

There are various factors that could contribute to continued – albeit slower – decline in US emissions, in the absence of federal regulations. These include falling costs for clean technologies, higher fossil-fuel prices and state-level legislation.

Despite Trump’s rhetoric, coal plants have become uneconomic to operate in the US compared with cheaper renewables and gas. As a result, Trump has overseen a larger reduction in coal-fired capacity than any other US president.

Meanwhile, in spite of the openly hostile policy environment, relatively low-cost US wind and solar projects are competitive with gas power and are still likely to be built in large numbers.

The vast majority of new US power capacity in recent years has been solar, wind and storage. Around 92% of power projects seeking electricity interconnection in the US are solar, wind and storage, with the remainder nearly all gas.

The broader transition to low-carbon transport is well underway in the US, with electric vehicle sales breaking records during nearly every month in 2025.

This can partly be attributed to federal tax credits, which the Trump administration is now cutting. However, cheaper models, growing consumer preference and state policies are likely to continue strengthening support.

Even if emissions continue on a downward trajectory, repealing the endangerment finding could make it harder to drive more ambitious climate action in the future. Some climate experts also point to the uncertainty of future emissions reductions.

“[It] depends on a number of technology, policy, economic and behavioural factors. Other folks are less sanguine about greenhouse gas declines,” WRI’s Widawsky tells Carbon Brief.

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The post Q&A: What does Trump’s repeal of US ‘endangerment finding’ mean for climate action? appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Q&A: What does Trump’s repeal of US ‘endangerment finding’ mean for climate action?