During the 2024 UK general election campaign, politicians and newspapers have used a series of “scary-sounding numbers” to mislead voters about net-zero.
While some of the numbers are accurate in isolation, they have been used in false or misleading ways, shaved of context and typically designed to exaggerate the cost of cutting emissions.
Current prime minister Rishi Sunak, his energy secretary Claire Coutinho and a string of right-leaning newspapers have all been guilty of this approach.
The most common tactics for misleading voters about net-zero include: focusing on the cost of action without mentioning the cost of business-as-usual; mentioning the costs of cutting emissions but not the benefits; and omitting the costs of failing to tackle dangerous climate change.
Below, Carbon Brief factchecks a series of claims made around the election campaign, each of which involves a big number about “costs”. The article explains who made each claim, where the relevant number came from – and the missing context that makes the claim false or misleading.
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MISLEADING
Hundreds of billions
“We’ve just found a recording that they have put out there from the deputy chancellor from the Labour Party admitting that their [climate] plans will cost hundreds of billions of pounds.”
– Rishi Sunak during BBC leaders’ debate – 26 June 2024
Where it comes from
In what appears to have been a coordinated move, Sunak attacked Labour’s net-zero plans during the final leaders’ debate hosted by BBC News, by citing an article published online the same evening in the Daily Telegraph. The article, which appeared on the newspaper’s frontpage the following morning, is based on public comments by Labour’s Darren Jones in March 2024 about the cost of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050, which is also government policy. The target was legislated in 2019 under Conservative former prime minister Theresa May.
What it excludes
Sunak misleads voters by omitting the fact that his own government – as well as the Conservative manifesto – also support the net-zero by 2050 target. He also ignores the costs of inaction on climate change and the evidence that accelerated action would yield significant economic benefits.
In 2019, the Climate Change Committee estimated that the net cost to the whole economy of reaching net-zero by 2050 would amount to £1.4tn, offset by savings from lower fossil fuel bills of £1.1tn. As set out by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) in 2021, this amounted to a net cost of £321bn over nearly 30 years – consistent with the “hundreds of billions” cited by Labour’s Darren Jones. Furthermore, the OBR estimated that only a quarter of the costs of reaching net-zero would come from public spending and that delaying action towards the target could double the overall cost to the UK. It added that failing to act on climate change would have far greater impacts on the economy and public finances, concluding: “Unmitigated climate change would ultimately have catastrophic economic and fiscal consequences.”
In a 2023 report, the OBR found that continued reliance on gas could be more than twice as costly for the exchequer as reaching net-zero. Separate analysis for trade group Energy UK concluded: “[A]n accelerated transition [to net-zero] could boost the UK’s economy by £240bn in 2050 more than current trajectories…Under the most ambitious scenario, the GDP of each area of the UK would be 5.4%-7.5% greater in 2050 than under the current trajectory.”
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FALSE
£116bn
“Labour are still not being honest about the costs of their energy policy. Independent energy experts have warned that Labour’s 2030 target would need an extra £116bn of investment, which means one thing…higher taxes for millions of Brits.”
– Claire Coutinho tweet – 25 June 2024
Where it comes from
The figure is based on analysis by consultancy Aurora, which said a total of £116bn would need to be invested during 2025-2035 to reach Labour’s 2030 clean power target. This works at an average of £10.6bn per year, according to Aurora.
What it excludes
The current secretary of state’s phrasing is false. The same Aurora analysis said a total of £105bn would need to be invested during 2025-2035 to meet the government’s own target of clean power by 2035, averaging £9.5bn per year. As such, the “extra” investment is only £11bn over 11 years, or £1bn a year.
Coutinho’s claim that higher investment would mean higher taxes is also false, as electricity sector investment is predominantly from the private sector and paid for via bills. Moreover, Aurora has said, based on the same analysis, that consumer energy bills would be lower under Labour’s 2030 target than under a 2035 clean power goal – or under the current, less ambitious trajectory. Aurora said: “Either scenario will be highly challenging to implement, stretching the limits of deliverability. However, if delivered, increased investment could lead to lower total system costs once the long-term savings from lower gas consumption are included.”
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FALSE
£30bn
“Ditching Net Zero could save the public sector over £30bn per year for the next 25 years.”
– Reform manifesto – 17 June 2024
Where it comes from
Reform, a climate-sceptic party led and majority owned by Nigel Farage, offers almost no information on how it arrived at this figure. According to the OBR, public-sector spending on net-zero is estimated at around £8bn per year. The only other number mentioned by Reform is for renewable energy subsidies, which it puts at £10bn per year. These are paid by consumers, not the government, such that scrapping them would not save the public sector any money. Instead, Reform proposes to tax renewables by an equivalent amount, which would likely end investor confidence in the UK across the board.
What it excludes
Reform is claiming, implausibly, that the government could save more than it currently spends. It also focuses on the costs of reaching net-zero while ignoring benefits, as well as the cost of business-as-usual. The CCC has estimated that reaching net-zero will entail net investment costs of £44bn per year out to 2050, offset by operational cost savings of £29bn per year, with the annual cost in total averaging £15bn. This excludes wider GDP impacts: the CCC said that the size of the economy, the number of jobs and real disposable incomes would all grow under a net-zero pathway. The CCC’s monetary estimates also exclude the cost of climate impacts, the sizeable health benefits of improved air quality and other externalities. The IEA recently concluded that accelerating climate action towards net-zero “could lead to major reductions in household energy bills”, again purely looking at economic costs and benefits. According to the OBR, the UK government spent £51bn on energy bill support during 2022-23, after gas prices rocketed.
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FALSE
£2tn
“The UK cost of net-zero has been estimated by the National Grid and others at some £2tn or more. It is so big that no one really knows.”
– Draft Reform manifesto – 19 March 2024
Where it comes from
In 2020, National Grid Electricity System Operator (ESO) estimated the cost of building and operating a net-zero energy system at a cumulative total of £2.8-3tn by 2050. This is the total cost of building and operating the country’s energy system for 30 years.
What it excludes
The Reform statement is false. The same National Grid ESO report said: “Scenarios where we hit net-zero in 2050…incur broadly the same costs as the scenario where we miss our net-zero target.” As such, based on the National Grid ESO analysis, there would not be any additional cost to hitting net-zero relative to running an energy system that does not meet the target. Moreover, in 2021, the Treasury stated: “The costs of global [climate] inaction significantly outweigh the costs of action.”
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FALSE
£2.8-3tn
“National Grid ESO, the company which manages our electricity supply, has estimated decarbonising Britain’s entire energy system will cost between £2.8tn and £3tn between now and 2050, working out at between £108bn and £115bn a year.”
– Sun comment by Ross Clark – 23 June 2024
Where it comes from
In 2020, National Grid Electricity System Operator (ESO) estimated the cost of the country’s energy system at a cumulative total of £2.8-3tn by 2050. This is the total cost of building and operating the energy system for 30 years.
What it excludes
The climate-sceptic columnist’s statement is false. The same National Grid report said: “Scenarios where we hit net-zero in 2050…incur broadly the same costs as the scenario where we miss our net-zero target.” As such, based on the National Grid ESO analysis, there would not be any additional cost to hitting net-zero, relative to running an energy system that does not meet the target. Furthermore, the £108-115bn annual cost cited by Clark can be compared with the £265bn spent by UK consumers on energy in 2022 – when fossil fuel costs spiked due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – including more than £100bn on imported oil and gas alone. These 2022 figures did not include investment in new infrastructure.
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FALSE
£1,000
“[R]estoring the 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars will cost an estimated extra £1,000 per household per year from 2022 until 2050.”
– Sunday Telegraph article and editorial – 15 June 2024
Where it comes from
The Sunday Telegraph article and accompanying editorial are based on a dossier compiled by free-market thinktank the Institute of Economic Affairs, which, in turn, cites a 2022 report published by consultancy the Centre for Economic and Business Research (CEBR). The CEBR work was funded by Fair Fuel UK, the motoring lobby group run by climate-sceptic Reform candidate for London mayor Howard Cox. The newspaper omits this detail from its article.
What it excludes
The Sunday Telegraph claim is false, because the underlying report from CEBR makes the “simply perverse” assumption that the relative cost of petrol and electric vehicles (EVs) is unchanged for the next 30 years. The assumption that EVs will continue to face a purchase price premium over petrol cars is directly contradicted by the evidence of falling costs, including recent data showing that EVs are now close to up-front price parity in the UK. The Climate Change Committee (CCC) concluded that an earlier combustion-engine car ban would deliver £6bn in cost savings, because EVs have much lower running costs than petrol cars, again directly contradicting the CEBR and Sunday Telegraph claims. When Sunak delayed the combustion-car ban from 2030 to 2035, the CCC said this was “likely to increase…motoring costs for households”, adding that EVs were “significantly cheaper than petrol or diesel vehicles to own and operate”.
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TRUE
£265bn
“The UK spent a staggering £265bn on energy in 2022 – the most recent data available – including more than £100bn on imported oil and gas alone”
– Tweet by Carbon Brief’s Simon Evans – 8 February 2024
Where it comes from
This is the cost of energy – the majority of it being fossil fuels – bought in the UK in 2022 at market prices, reflecting the cost to consumers of heat, power and transport fuel. The data was the most recently available at time of publication and covers the first year of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when Russia restricted gas supplies to Europe and sent fossil fuel prices rocketing. In the pre-crisis year of 2021, the UK spent £184bn on energy.
What it excludes
These figures do not include investment in energy-related infrastructure, such as power plants, pylons, boilers, cars or heat pumps. Many conversations about the cost of reaching net-zero ignore the substantial costs of the status quo, which is heavily reliant on volatile fossil fuels.
The post Factcheck: How ‘scary-sounding numbers’ are being used to mislead the UK about net-zero appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Factcheck: How ‘scary-sounding numbers’ are being used to mislead the UK about net-zero
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 10 October 2025: Renewables power past coal; Legacy of UK’s Climate Change Act; Fukushima’s solar future
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Renewables overtake coal
‘HISTORIC FIRST’: Renewables have overtaken coal to become the world’s leading source of electricity for the first six months of this year in a “historic first”, BBC News said. The analysis, from the thinktank Ember, found the world generated “almost a third” more solar power in the first half of the year, compared with the same period in 2024, while wind power grew by “just over 7%,” reported the Guardian.
HEAVY LIFTING: According to the report, China and India were “largely responsible for the surge in renewables”, while the US and Europe “relied more heavily on fossil fuels,” the Guardian wrote. China built more renewables than every other country combined in the first half of this year, the newspaper added.
CONTINENTAL SHIFTS: A second report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicted a “surge” in global wind and solar capacity by 2030, but shaved 5% off its previous forecast, the Financial Times said. The IEA revealed that India is set to become the second-largest growth market for renewables after China, “with capacity expected to increase 2.5 times by 2030”, Down to Earth reported. The IEA also upped its forecast for renewables in the Middle East and north Africa by 23%, “helped by Saudi Arabia rolling out wind turbines and solar panels”, but halved the outlook for the US, the FT noted.
Around the world
- EV BOOM: Sales of electric and hybrid cars made up “more than half” of all new car registrations in the UK last month, a new record, according to data from the Society of Motor Manufacturers, reported BBC News.
- BANKING COLLAPSE: A global banking alliance launched by the UN to get banks to slash the carbon footprint of their loans and investments and help drive the transition to a net-zero economy by 2050 has collapsed after four years, Agence France-Press reported.
- CUTS, CUTS, CUTS: The Trump administration plans to cut nearly $24bn in funding for more than 600 climate projects across the US, according to documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.
- PEOPLE POWER: A farmer, a prison guard and a teacher were among those from the Dutch-Caribbean island Bonaire who appeared at the Hague on Tuesday to “accuse the Netherlands of not doing enough to protect them from the effects of climate change”, Politico reported.
400,000
The number of annual service days logged by the US National Guard responding to hurricanes, wildfires and other natural disasters over the past decade, according to a Pentagon report to Congress, Inside Climate News reported.
Latest climate research
- Politicians in the UK “overwhelmingly overestimate the time period humanity has left to bend the temperature curve”, according to a survey of 100 MPs | Nature Communications Earth and Environment
- Fire-driven degradation of the Amazon last year released nearly 800m tonnes of CO2 equivalent, surpassing emissions from deforestation and marking the “worst Amazon forest disturbance in over two decades” | Biogeosciences
- Some 43% of the 200 most damaging wildfires recorded over 1980-2023 occurred in the last decade | Science
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
The UK’s Climate Change Act, landmark legislation that guides the nation’s response to climate change, is increasingly coming under attack from anti-net-zero right-leaning politicians. In a factcheck published this week, Carbon Brief explained how the UK’s Climate Change Act was among the first comprehensive national climate laws in the world and the first to include legally binding emissions targets. In total, 69 countries have now passed “framework” climate laws similar to the UK’s Climate Change Act, with laws in New Zealand, Canada and Nigeria among those explicitly based on the UK model. This is up from just four when the act was legislated in 2008. Of these, 14 are explicitly titled the “Climate Change Act”.
Spotlight
Fukushima’s solar future
This week, Carbon Brief examines how Fukushima helped to recover from nuclear disaster by building solar farms on contaminated farmland.
On 11 March 2011, an earthquake off the pacific coast of Japan caused 15m-tall waves to crash into the eastern region of Tōhoku, killing 19,500 people and injuring a further 6,000.
In the aftermath, flooding at the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power plant caused cooling systems to fail, leaching radioactive contaminants into the soil and leading to a major nuclear incident.
Some 1,200km2 around the site was restricted and up to 100,000 people were evacuated – in some cases forever.
In the years following, Japan entered a fraught debate about nuclear energy.
In 2010, nuclear power provided 25% of Japan’s electricity, but, in the years following the disaster, its 54 nuclear reactors were taken offline.
Successive governments have fought over reintroducing nuclear power. Today, some 14 reactors are back online, 27 have been permanently closed and another 19 remain suspended. (Japan’s newly-elected prime minister Sanae Takaichi has promised to make nuclear central to her energy strategy.)
Against this backdrop, Fukushima – a prefecture home to 1.8 million people – has emerged as a surprise leader in the renewables race.
In 2014, the Fukushima Renewable Energy Institute (FREA) opened with the twin goals of promoting research and development into renewable energy, while “making a contribution to industrial clusters and reconstruction”.
That same year, the prefecture declared a target of 100% renewable power by 2040.
Contaminated land
“A lot of these communities, I know, were looking for ways to revitalise their economy,” said Dr Jennifer Sklarew, assistant professor of energy and sustainability at George Mason University and author of “Building Resilient Energy Systems: Lessons from Japan”.
Once evacuation orders were lifted, however, residents in many parts of Fukushima were faced with a dilemma, explained Skarlew:
“Since that area was largely agricultural, and the agriculture was facing challenges due to stigma, and also due to the soil being removed [as part of the decontamination efforts], they had to find something else.”
One solution came in the form of rent, paid to farmers by companies, to use their land as solar farms.
Michiyo Miyamoto, energy finance specialist at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told Carbon Brief:
“The [Fukushima] prefecture mapped suitable sites early and conducted systematic consultations with residents and agricultural groups before projects were proposed. This upfront process reduced land-use conflicts, shortened permitting timelines and gave developers clarity.”
As a result, large-scale solar capacity in Fukushima increased to more than 1,300 megawatts (MW) from 2012 to 2023, according to Miyamoto. Moreover, installed renewable capacity now exceeds local demand, meaning the region can run entirely on clean power when conditions are favourable, Miyamoto said.
Today, aerial pictures of Fukushima reveal how solar panels have proliferated on farmland that was contaminated in the nuclear disaster.
Charging on
Last year, 60% of Fukushima’s electricity was met by renewables, up from 22% in 2011. (The country as a whole still lags behind at 27%.)
And that is set to grow after Japan’s largest onshore windfarm started operations earlier this year in Abukuma, Fukushima, with a capacity of 147MW.
The growth of solar and wind means that Fukushima is already “ahead of schedule” for its 2040 target of 100% renewable power, said Miyamoto:
“The result is a credible pathway from recovery to leadership, with policy, infrastructure and targets working in concert.”
Watch, read, listen
OVERSHOOT: The Strategic Climate Risks Initiative, in partnership with Planet B Productions, has released a four-part podcast series exploring what will happen if global warming exceeds 1.5C.
DRONE WARFARE: On Substack, veteran climate campaigner and author Bill McKibben considered the resilience of solar power amid modern warfare.
CLIMATE AND EMPIRE: For Black history month, the Energy Revolution podcast looked at how “race and the legacies of empire continue to impact the energy transition”.
Coming up
- 12 October: presidential elections, Cameroon
- 13-14 October: Pre-COP, Brasilia, Brazil
- 13-18 October: World Bank Group/IMF annual meetings, Washington DC
- 14-17 October: 2nd extraordinary session of the Marine Environment Protection Committee at the International Maritime Organisation, London
- 15-16 October: Circle of Finance Ministers report
Pick of the jobs
- Buckinghamshire Council, principal climate change officer | Salary: £49,354-£51,759. Location: Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire
- Sustainable NI, sustainable business lead | Salary: £60,000. Location: Belfast, Northern Ireland
- Dialogue Earth, South Asia managing editor | Salary: £1,875 per month. Location: South Asia
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
The post DeBriefed 10 October 2025: Renewables power past coal; Legacy of UK’s Climate Change Act; Fukushima’s solar future appeared first on Carbon Brief.
The Caribbean region is among the most vulnerable to climate change, despite historically contributing less than half of one percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Rising sea levels, extreme heat and more frequent and intense storms – such as the 2024 Hurricane Beryl, which made landfall in Grenada – pose urgent and growing threats to the small island states, coastal nations and overseas territories that comprise the Caribbean region.
With global progress to address climate change still too slow, Caribbean countries are taking matters into their own hands by enacting more robust legislation to help protect against climate risks.
In a new study published in the Carbon and Climate Law Review, we identified 78 climate laws and legally binding decrees across 16 Caribbean states, as well as two constitutional references to climate change and a growing recognition of the right to a healthy environment.
Our analysis suggests that, together, these developments are not only enhancing resilience, but also positioning Caribbean states as influential actors in the global climate arena.
Caribbean climate laws on the rise
Climate governance in the Caribbean has expanded significantly in recent years. In the past decade, countries such as Cuba and the Dominican Republic have embedded climate obligations and programmatic guidelines into their national constitutions.
At the same time, legislative recognition of the human right to a healthy environment is gaining momentum across the region. Six Caribbean nations now affirm the right in their constitutions, while 15 have recognised it through international instruments, such as the UN Council, UN Assembly and the Escazu Agreement, as shown in the figure below.
More recently, there has been a notable rise in targeted, sector-specific climate frameworks that go beyond broader environmental statutes.
Saint Lucia stands out as the only country with a climate framework law, or a comprehensive national law that outlines long-term climate strategies across multiple domains. Meanwhile, several other Caribbean governments have adopted climate-specific laws that focus on individual sectors, such as energy, migration and disaster management.
According to our analysis, more than a quarter of climate-relevant legislation in the region – comprising 21 laws and legally binding decrees – now has an explicit focus on climate change, as illustrated in the chart below.
Our research suggests that this represents an ongoing shift in legislative focus, reflecting changes in how climate legislation is being structured in one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions.
Caribbean nations are also advancing legal reforms to structure and institutionalise climate finance and market mechanisms directly into domestic law, aligned with Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement.
For example, the Bahamas has introduced provisions for carbon credit trading, while Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados and Grenada have established national climate financing mechanisms to support mitigation and adaptation efforts.
Some states, including Belize and Saint Kitts and Nevis, have incorporated regional bodies such as the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre – the climate arm of the intergovernmental Caribbean community organisation CARICOM – into national frameworks. This indicates an increasing alignment between regional cooperation and domestic law.
In addition to the influx of regulations specifically addressing climate change, Caribbean nations are also legislating broader environmental issues, which, in turn, could provide increased resilience from climate impacts and risks, as shown in the graph above.
Key trends in these types of climate-related laws include the expansion of disaster risk management governance, which addresses national preparedness for climate-induced weather events or related catastrophes. Likewise, energy law is an increasingly prominent focus, with countries including Antigua and Barbuda and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines integrating renewable energy and energy efficiency goals into national climate governance.
More broadly, many Caribbean nations have adopted wide-ranging and comprehensive environmental laws, many of which were developed in alignment with existing climate commitments. In combination, these legal developments reflect a dynamic and evolving climate governance landscape across the region.
Proactive vs reactive approaches
Despite general alignment with these broader regional trends, our research reveals distinct developmental pathways shaping domestic climate regulation.
In the eastern Caribbean, for example, we saw both proactive, long-term planning strategies and reactive, post-disaster reforms.
Saint Lucia’s multifaceted approach to climate resilience evolved steadily over the course of more than a decade. During this time, the country developed numerous adaptation plans, strengthened cross-sectoral coordination and engaged in institutional climate reforms in areas such as energy, tourism, finance and development.
More recently, the passage of Saint Lucia’s Climate Change Act in 2024 marked a milestone in climate governance, by giving legal force to the country’s obligations under the UNFCCC, the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement – making Saint Lucia one of the few small island states to incorporate global climate commitments into domestic law.
Our research indicates that this strategy has not only positioned the country as a more climate-resilient nation, but also solidified its access to international climate financing.
In contrast, Dominica’s efforts evolved more rapidly in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017, which destroyed over 200% of the country’s GDP. The storm’s impacts were felt across the country and hit particularly hard for the Kalinago people – the Caribbean’s last Indigenous community – highlighting the role of socioeconomic disparities in shaping climate vulnerability and resilience.
In response, the government passed the Climate Resilience Act, creating the temporary Climate Resilience Execution Agency for Dominica (CREAD).
Beyond establishing an exclusively climate-focused institution, the act aimed to embed resilience into governance by mandating the participation of vulnerable communities – including Indigenous peoples, women, older people and people with disabilities – in shaping and monitoring climate resilience projects.
As noted in a recent statement by the UN special rapporteur on Climate Change, Dr Elisa Morgera, these frameworks underscore the government’s ambition to become the world’s first “climate-resilient nation.”
Although challenges persist, Dominica’s efforts demonstrate how post-disaster urgency can drive institutional change, including the integration of rights and resilience into climate governance.
Uneven progress and structural gaps
Despite significant progress, our research shows that several key opportunities for climate governance across the Caribbean continue to exist, which could enable improvements in both resilience and long-term ambition.
The region’s legal landscape remains somewhat heterogeneous. While Saint Lucia has enacted a comprehensive climate framework law, the rest of the region lacks similar blanket legislation. This includes some states that entirely lack climate-specific laws, instead relying on related laws and frameworks to regulate and respond to climate-related risks.
Other nations have yet to adopt explicit disaster-risk management frameworks, leaving Caribbean populations vulnerable before, during and after climate emergencies. Most have yet to enshrine the right to a healthy environment at the national level.
Our research suggests that outdated legal frameworks are further limiting progress in addressing current climate risks. Because many of the longer-standing environmental laws in the region were adopted well before climate policy became a mainstream concern, some fail to address the nature, frequency and intensity of modern climate challenges, such as sea-level rise, tropical storms, wildfires, floods, droughts and other impacts.
More broadly, many Caribbean climate laws include limited integration of gender equity, Indigenous rights and social justice. As Caribbean nations such as Grenada and the Dominican Republic begin to link climate resilience with these issues, the region has an opportunity to lead by example.
Ultimately, capacity and resource constraints persist as significant barriers to implementation and adaptation.
The Caribbean region faces debt that exacerbates ongoing development challenges, a burden made heavier by the repeated economic shocks of climate-related disasters. Along with regional debt-for-resilience schemes, increased funding from high-emitting countries to support adaptation measures in climate-vulnerable nations – as endorsed under the Paris Agreement – is likely to be critical to ensuring the region’s climate laws can be executed effectively.
Global implications of Caribbean climate law
Our research suggests that Caribbean countries are outpacing other regions in terms of the scope and ambition of their climate laws. This legislation has the potential to serve as a model for climate-vulnerable nations worldwide.
Continuing efforts in the region show that legal frameworks in the field can not only drive resilience, embed rights and strengthen claims to international finance, but also highlight how regional cooperation and diplomacy can enhance global influence.
These findings demonstrate that innovation in climate law need not wait for action from major emitters, but can instead be led by those on the front lines of climate change.
The post Guest post: How Caribbean states are shifting climate legislation appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: How Caribbean states are shifting climate legislation
More than 100 countries have cut their dependence on fossil-fuel imports and saved hundreds of billions of dollars by continuing to invest in renewables, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
It says nations such as the UK, Germany and Chile have reduced their need for imported coal and gas by around a third since 2010, mainly by building wind and solar power.
Denmark has cut its reliance on fossil-fuel imports by nearly half over the same period.
Renewable expansion allowed these nations to collectively avoid importing 700m tonnes of coal and 400bn cubic metres of gas in 2023, equivalent to around 10% of global consumption.
In doing so, the fuel-importing countries saved more than $1.3tn between 2010 and 2023 that would otherwise have been spent on fossil fuels from overseas.
Reduced reliance
The IEA’s Renewables 2025 report quantifies the benefits of renewable-energy deployment for electricity systems in fossil fuel-importing nations.
It compares recent trends in renewable expansion to an alternative “low renewable-energy source” scenario, in which this growth did not take place.
In this counterfactual, fuel-importing countries stopped building wind, solar and other non-hydropower renewable-energy projects after 2010.
In reality, the world added around 2,500 gigawatts (GW) of such projects between 2010 and 2023, according to the IEA, more than the combined electricity generating capacity of the EU and US in 2023, from all sources. Roughly 80% of this new renewable capacity was built in nations that rely on coal and gas imports to generate electricity.
The chart below shows how 31 of these countries have substantially cut their dependence on imported fossil fuels over the 13-year period, as a result of expanding their wind, solar and other renewable energy supplies. All of these countries are net importers of coal and gas.
In total, the IEA identified 107 countries that had reduced their dependence on fossil fuel imports for electricity generation, to some extent due to the deployment of renewables other than hydropower.
Of these, 38 had cut their reliance on electricity from imported coal and gas by more than 10 percentage points and eight had seen that share drop by more than 30 percentage points.
Security and resilience
The IEA stresses that renewables “inherently strengthen energy supply security”, because they generate electricity domestically, while also “improving…economic resilience” in fossil-fuel importer countries.
This is particularly true for countries with low or dwindling domestic energy resources.
The agency cites the energy crisis exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which exposed EU importers to spiralling fossil-fuel prices.
Bulgaria, Romania and Finland – which have historically depended on Russian gas for electricity generation – have all brought their import reliance close to zero in recent years by building renewables.
In the UK, where there has been mounting opposition to renewables from right-wing political parties, the IEA says reliance on electricity generated with imported fossil fuels has dropped from 45% to under 25% in a decade, thanks primarily to the growth of wind and solar power.
Without these technologies, the UK would now be needing to import fossil fuels to supply nearly 60% of its electricity, the IEA says.
Other major economies, notably China and the EU, would also have had to rely on a growing share of coal and gas from overseas, if they had not expanded renewables.
As well as increasing the need for fossil-fuel imports from other countries, switching renewables for fossil fuels would require significantly higher energy usage “due to [fossil fuels’] lower conversion efficiencies”, the IEA notes. Each gigawatt-hour (GWh) of renewable power produced has avoided the need for 2-3GWh of fossil fuels, it explains.
Finally, the IEA points out that spending on renewables rather than imported fossil fuels keeps more investment in domestic economies and supports local jobs.
The post IEA: Renewables have cut fossil-fuel imports for more than 100 countries appeared first on Carbon Brief.
IEA: Renewables have cut fossil-fuel imports for more than 100 countries
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