Earlier this month, a years-long legal attempt by community and environmental groups to challenge a new oil project in Horse Hill, Surrey resulted in victory – with implications for all new fossil fuel projects in the UK.
On 20 June, the Supreme Court, the highest court for civil cases in the UK, issued a majority judgment ruling that Surrey County Council acted unlawfully by granting planning permission for the project, because councillors did not consider the climate impact from burning the fuel.
It came after an “incredibly finely balanced” legal battle, which saw multiple courts reject the arguments made by environmental groups – and judges in the Supreme Court take nearly a year to come to their own conclusion.
The judgment, which will now lead to changes in how the environmental impact of new fossil fuel projects is assessed, has been described as “landmark”, “watershed” and “tide-turning” by environmental groups, while right-leaning media warned it could “kill off the oil industry” completely.
Below, Carbon Brief speaks to environmental lawyers to unpack what happened in the Horse Hill case, what it actually means for UK fossil fuel production and how it could affect the policies of the next UK government.
- What happened in the Horse Hill case?
- What does the judgment mean for other fossil fuel projects in the UK?
- Could it affect other carbon-intensive projects, such as airport and road expansion?
- What could the judgment mean for the next UK government?
What happened in the Horse Hill case?
The story began back in 2012 when Surrey County Council granted planning permission for Horse Hill Developments Ltd to dig an exploratory oil well at Horse Hill, a site close to the town of Horley in Surrey and 3.5km north of Gatwick Airport.
In 2017, the council granted permission for a second borehole, a sidetrack well and for testing to commence.
In 2019, the council granted permission for the project to start drilling for oil – just two months after it had passed a motion declaring a climate emergency. The project was to include six oil wells, which would produce 3m tonnes of oil over a 20-year period.
In 2020, Sarah Finch, a freelance editor representing the Weald Action Group, a network of organisations opposing oil and gas in southern England, decided to challenge the council’s decision to grant planning permission in the High Court, with charity Friends of the Earth acting as the legal intervener.
(There is a clear scientific consensus that new fossil fuel projects are incompatible with meeting the Paris Agreement’s ambition of keeping global temperatures at 1.5C.)
Finch and her representatives argued that the decision to permit the oil development was unlawful because the council did not take into account the climate impact of burning the fossil fuels produced by the project.
Under an EU directive that has been incorporated into UK law, any development that is likely to have a significant effect on the environment must carry out an environmental impact assessment (EIA). This assessment must be considered by the decision makers responsible for permitting the project.
The legal challenge argued that the EIA for the Horse Hill drilling project only considered the climate impact from the process of dredging up the oil from the ground, rather than from burning the oil.
As with any fossil fuel project, the emissions from burning the fuel are far larger than those from simply setting up operations, Katie de Kauwe, the lead in-house lawyer at Friends of the Earth, explains to Carbon Brief:
“In the Finch case, the developer assessed that the operational emissions were around 114,000 tonnes of [carbon dioxide] equivalent (CO2e). But then during the hearing, it was recorded that the end use emissions from burning the oil were over 10m tonnes. So they really are dwarfed. And the decision maker had no information on that whatsoever when they granted permission for the oil drilling in Surrey.”
But, in December 2020, the High Court ruled that the council had acted lawfully, with the judge concluding that it would have been “impossible” for the council to have considered the emissions from burning the oil.
Finch appealed the decision. In November 2021, a Court of Appeal hearing before three judges resulted in an “unusual” split decision, with two judges upholding that the council acted lawfully and the third producing a strong dissenting judgment that it had not.
In contrast to the High Court judgment, the Court of Appeal judgment said that decision makers for fossil fuel projects are not prohibited from considering the emissions from burning the fuels.
However, in practical terms, it left it up to the decision makers themselves as to whether they will consider these emissions or not.
Finch appealed again, leading to a hearing before the Supreme Court, the highest court in the UK for civil cases, in June 2023. This took place before five judges.
In this hearing, legal interventions were made by Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, the Office for Environmental Protection and representatives of the company behind a new coal mine in Whitehaven, Cumbria, which itself is facing a legal challenge from environmental groups (more on this below).
The Office for Environment Protection was set up post-Brexit to act as an independent environmental watchdog, pursuing the enforcement of environmental law and the introduction of new protections. It was the first time this office had intervened in a court case.
The Supreme Court took almost a year to deliver its judgment, which finally came on 20 June 2024.
It delivered a majority decision from three of the five judges that Surrey County Council had acted unlawfully in permitting the oil project, with the other judges giving a dissenting judgment.
Delivering the majority judgment, Lord Leggatt ruled that the decision to grant planning permission for the oil project was unlawful as the project’s EIA failed to assess the climate impact of burning the oil, and the reasons for disregarding this were “demonstrably flawed”.
Rejecting the arguments made by the council, the developer and the government that the emissions from burning the oil were not within their control, Lord Leggatt said:
“The combustion emissions are manifestly not outwith the control of the site operators. They are entirely within their control. If no oil is extracted, no combustion emissions will occur. Conversely, any extraction of oil by the site operators will in due course result in greenhouse gas emissions upon its inevitable combustion.”
The Supreme Court said any suggestion that local planning authorities are unable to consider climate change when making planning decisions is “misguided”.
It also rejected the Court of the Appeal’s ruling that it should be up to the decision maker to decide whether to consider emissions from burning the fuels produced by new fossil-fuel projects, with Lord Leggatt saying this “would be a recipe for unpredictable, inconsistent and arbitrary decision-making”.
It is the first time in UK legislative history that a judgment has ruled that decision-makers should consider the emissions from burning fossil fuels – also known as scope 3 emissions – and not just those from the project’s operations.
It follows on from a similar ruling in Norway in January of this year.
In a statement, environmental charity ClientEarth lawyer Sophie Marjanac said the two judgments indicated that the world is “reaching a tipping point where countries and companies are going to have to comprehensively account for the impact of every fossil fuel project on the climate”.
Speaking to Carbon Brief, Angus Walker, an infrastructure planning solicitor, noted that, from the very start, the Finch case proved highly divisive among the court judges:
“It was incredibly finely balanced all the way from the very first stage…It’s interesting that the dissenting judgment is as long as the leading judgment, that also shows how finely balanced it was. And it took them a year to produce it, which I think is unusually long even for the Supreme Court. Does that mean they were agonising over it? I don’t know.”
What does the judgment mean for other fossil fuel projects in the UK?
Much of the coverage of the judgment focused on what it could mean for the UK’s fossil-fuel industry.
Environmental groups described the ruling as “landmark”, “watershed” and “tide-turning”, while right-wing media warned it could “kill off the oil industry” completely.
Lawyers explain to Carbon Brief that the judgment will have consequences for new fossil fuel projects in the UK. However, it does not amount to a “ban” or “block” on Horse Hill or other similar projects.
Rather, the judgment makes it clear that, when an EIA is produced for a new fossil-fuel project, this should include information on the emissions associated with burning the coal, oil or gas produced – and not just the much smaller emissions from the project’s operations. Walker explains:
“It’s just assessing and reporting. The decision makers can still grant [an oil project planning permission], but it’s just about knowing what the impacts are. The judgment is careful to point out this is only information for the decision maker, it is not a factor that itself bans these projects from going ahead.”
Tessa Khan, an environmental lawyer and founder of Uplift, a group supporting actions on ending new oil and gas production, adds:
“It’s groundbreaking because, until now, when an EIA was done for an oil and gas project, you didn’t even need to know what the scope 3 emissions would be before you said that the environmental impacts were compatible with the decision to approve the project.
“What Horse Hill does is say that information has to be on the desk of the decision maker. But that doesn’t mean that that’s an automatic block on the project, it’s just one factor in the mix of different factors.”
The kinds of developments that are required to produce EIAs when looking to obtain development consent in the UK include onshore oil and gas, offshore oil and gas in the North Sea and coal mining projects.
When it comes to North Sea oil and gas projects, developers must first obtain a licence for fossil fuel exploration from the regulator, the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA).
After this, developers will apply for development consent, which is granted by the NSTA and the secretary of state for energy infrastructure, which would currently be the secretary of state for energy security and net-zero, Claire Coutinho.
It is at this stage that project developers will have to produce an EIA containing information on emissions from burning the fossil fuels.
That means that oil and gas projects that have been awarded a licence for exploration, but have not yet obtained development consent, will be affected by the Horse Hill judgment.
Previous Carbon Brief analysis shows there are dozens of such projects looking to obtain development consent sometime between now and 2025.
North Sea oil and gas projects that have already received development consent, such as the Rosebank oil field, will not be automatically affected.
However, the judgment will offer new arms to legal challenges against such projects.
Khan, who is contributing to a legal challenge against Rosebank that is due to be held in the next few months, says:
“Our legal challenge against Rosebank, if we succeed, would mean that the decision has to be remade around the development consent. And so in making that decision, the government and the regulator would then have to consider the scope 3 emissions.”
Rosebank contains around 325m barrels of oil equivalent. Previous Carbon Brief analysis found that, when burnt, this would produce around 150m tonnes of CO2e – roughly the same as produced each year by 90 of the world’s lowest-emitting countries.
Coal mining is another activity that is likely to be affected by the judgment.
This likely explains why representatives from the company behind a new coal mine in Whitehaven, Cumbria, were moved to intervene in the Supreme Court case on Horse Hill, experts tell Carbon Brief.
The controversial project was permitted by communities secretary Michael Gove in 2022 and would be the UK’s first new deep coal mine in 30 years.
It plans to produce coking coal to be exported for global steel production, rather than for power production.
De Kauwe, who with Friends of the Earth is mounting a legal challenge against the coal mine to be held in the High Court on 16-18 July, said the reasoning used in the Horse Hill judgment is likely to hold true for the mining project:
“Coal’s role in all of this is to be burned as part of that steelmaking process. So it doesn’t matter that it’s not being used in power generation, it’s still the burning of fossil fuel.”
As with Rosebank, an overturning of the development consent given to the Cumbria mine by Gove would lead to the project having to produce a new EIA including information on emissions from burning the coal produced.
Could it affect other carbon-intensive projects, such as airport and road expansion?
While it is clear that the judgment will have implications for fossil fuel projects in the UK, it is unlikely to have consequences for other carbon-intensive infrastructure projects, such as airport and road expansion, experts tell Carbon Brief.
The judgment makes it clear that the ruling only applies to fossil-fuel projects, de Kauwe says:
“I think Lord Leggatt is very clear that in requiring the assessment of downstream emissions for fossil fuel projects, this is not opening up the floodgates, that was something that had clearly bothered both the High Court judge and the Court of Appeal.”
The judgment specifically says that fossil fuel projects are unique when compared to other types of carbon-intensive infrastructure, such as aeroplane manufacturing, she adds:
“[Lord Leggatt] said that the difference with fossil fuels, these have an inevitable use. They’ve only got one use. It’s for combustion.”
Walker adds that both road and airport expansion projects already consider the additional emissions from creating more car traffic or flights.
What could the judgment mean for the next UK government?
The judgment comes just days before a general election in the UK.
Carbon Brief has assessed where each party stands on fossil fuels. For example, the Conservatives have pledged to continue issuing new North Sea oil and gas licences, while Reform has promised to “fast-track” them.
Polls suggest that the Labour party is likely to win the election.
Labour’s manifesto says it “will not issue new licences” for oil and gas exploration, but that it “will not revoke existing licences”, leaving vagueness around whether it will grant development consent to new projects that have an exploration licence already.
Outside of the manifesto, representatives of Labour have previously pledged to put a stop to Rosebank and Cambo, two of the largest new oil and gas projects.
In light of the judgment, it is probable that the new energy secretary, which is likely to be the shadow energy and net-zero secretary Ed Miliband, will be faced with deciding whether to grant development consent to new North Sea oil and gas projects – with, for the first time, full knowledge of the emissions that will be caused by burning the fuels produced.
Commenting on the likely impact of the judgment on decision makers, Walker says:
“It makes the negatives appear greater, I would have thought, when weighing up whether to give consent.”
The post Q&A: What does the ‘landmark’ Horse Hill judgment mean for UK fossil fuels? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: What does the ‘landmark’ Horse Hill judgment mean for UK fossil fuels?
Starting on Monday, about 10,000 government negotiators, scientists, journalists and campaigners will gather at a purpose-built venue in a national park in Mongolia’s capital Ulaanbaatar to discuss how to stop land turning into desert as the world warms.
Drought is currently sweeping much of the Northern hemisphere, leaving normally green urban parks looking like dry savannah, causing crops to fail, food prices to rise and billions to be shaved off economic output.
On Wednesday, Britain’s prime minister chaired an emergency meeting of the government’s Cobra committee. These are usually reserved for wars, terrorist attacks, riots and pandemics – but this one was on the extreme heat and drought the UK has been suffering since May.
With many countries facing far worse with fewer resources than the UK, the issues to be discussed at the UN’s COP17 summit in Mongolia – often overlooked – should be nearer the top of policy-makers minds.
But what is COP17? What will be decided and announced there over the next two weeks? How does it relate to climate change and how will it help restore the lands on which we all rely for our food, water and other essential resources? Climate Home News explains all below.
What is COP17?
It is the conference of parties (COP) to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). The parties are 196 governments, which includes all of the countries recognised by the UN.
The convention was conceived at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, at the same time as the other two larger “Rio trio” conventions on climate and biodiversity.
While the climate convention’s COP takes place every year, the UNCCD COP happens only once every two years. COP17 will be its seventeenth gathering.
What is desertification?
It is the process by which land degrades and becomes more like a desert, making it harder – and sometimes impossible – to grow crops or graze livestock there.
Climate change and other human activities – like excessive irrigation which depletes ground water – are making this process worse, causing poverty, hunger, health problems, forced migration and loss of species.
It’s a widespread problem. The UN estimates that half a billion people live within areas that have experienced desertification since the 1980s and that two-fifths of the world’s land is degraded.
What has it got to do with climate change?
The planet’s climate is heating up, mainly due to humans burning fossil fuels, and drying out its land. This kills plants and exposes the soil which can then be blown away by wind and washed away by water.
Without a top layer of soil, plants struggle to grow again and the land gets closer to being a desert. So combating desertification is a way of adapting to climate change.
It is also a way of lessening the pace of climate change, as land degradation releases carbon dioxide previously stored in healthy soils and plants.
What will be negotiated at COP17?
The main issue is what form a new initiative to tackle drought could take. The last COP saw Africa push hard for this to be a protocol – a kind of binding sub-treaty to the UNCCD.
But the US, Europe, Argentina and others argued that would take too long to set up, cost too much and take money away from what can be spent on the ground. They prefer a legally weaker alternative – a framework instead of a protocol.
Negotiations went late into the last night of talks in Riyadh, with the Saudis hosting informal consultations, but eventually governments had to agree to disagree and pick up talks again in Ulaanbaatar.
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Governments will also negotiate a new policy on protecting rangelands and pastoralists from degradation. Rangelands are areas where animals graze. They cover around half the Earth’s land and include almost everything other than forest, deserts, farms, glaciers and cities. Pastoralists are people who herd animals on these rangelands, often moving from place to place to find fresh pasture.
COP17 host country Mongolia has a lot of both – and pushed successfully for the UN to declare 2026 the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists. It is keen to agree a decision at COP17 bringing those issues more to the forefront of the UNCCD.
Negotiators will also debate the UNCCD’s post-2030 strategic framework, which they hope to adopt at COP18 in 2028. Campaign groups like the World Wildlife Fund want a stronger focus on biodiversity and nature-positive food systems.
What will happen when?
The COP will formally open with a ceremony on Monday August 17, followed by opening statements by governments and the adoption of the agenda.
Negotiations will begin, mostly behind closed doors for two weeks until the closing plenaries on Friday August 28.
While talks rumble on in the background, the second week will see senior government representatives including ministers get involved, with a “high-level segment” running from August 24-26.
They will discuss issues like drought resilience, finance and pastoralist communities. This is likely to be when any announcements – of new funding, for instance – are made.
On Monday August 24, there will also be an open dialogue between government officials and civil society members. Here, local practitioners are likely to share stories of how they are helping their communities reverse land degradation. UNCCD prides itself on being a bottom-up convention.
Unlike climate COPs, which often end a day or two over time, UNCCD COPs usually finish on the evening of their last day and – while they have gone late into the night – have never run into the next day.
What else should we watch out for?
At the last COP two years ago, host Saudi Arabia led the creation of an initiative called the Riyadh Global Drought Resilience Partnership to help 80 of the poorest nations deal with drought.
It received $12 billion in pledges, mainly from Gulf-based development finance institutions. Saudi Arabia is expected to report back on whether these pledges have been delivered and how the money will reach those in need now.
There are also hopes that governments will announce financial support for Mongolia’s Rangelands Flagship Initiative, which aims to mobilise investment in projects to fight land degradation.
Who will preside over COP17?
While the last five and the next two climate COPs have been or will be presided over by men, COP17 will be woman-led with Mongolia’s foreign minister, Battsetseg Batmunkh, as president.
This will also be the first COP for the UNCCD’s new executive director Yasmin Fouad. Before being appointed environment minister in her native Egypt, Fouad was a scientist and lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s special report on desertification. She played a key role at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt in 2022.
Although Saudi Arabia’s UNCCD COP presidency is ending, the Gulf power house will likely continue to be influential. It has supported the COP financially as part of the Riyadh-Ulaanbaatar action agenda and will be following up on initiatives announced two years ago.
While Saudi Arabia is often blamed for obstructing progress at climate talks, as a desert nation it is generally thought to have played a constructive role at UNCCD COPs.
What are the negotiating dynamics?
The UNCCD has six main negotiating groups: Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Northern Mediterranean, Central and Eastern Europe, and developed donor countries. Governments can also speak in their own capacities.
While divisions between the Global North and Global South do exist at UNCCD COPs, they are not as stark as at climate COPs. The Global South’s umbrella group – the G77 and China – usually only speaks on finance issues, on which developing countries tend to be united.
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Civil society groups are present but not as vocal or as confrontational as at climate COPs. There are generally no protests and campaigners tend to try to hold governments accountable more quietly. There are likely to be far fewer journalists than at climate COPs too.
What role will the US play?
While the US has left the UN’s climate convention, it remains in the UNCCD and is expected to bring a delegation of officials from its departments of agriculture and state. It is likely to resist any renewed push from Africa for a drought protocol.
The post Will the world’s drying lands get relief from COP17 in Mongolia? appeared first on Climate Home News.
Will the world’s drying lands get relief from COP17 in Mongolia?
Helen Phillips’ book, ‘Hum’, is set in a dystopian near future, in a city suffering the effects of climate breakdown and with dire air quality. Robots (the Hums) press advertising messages during conversations, meetings and even as they carry out medical procedures.
The Hums are vehicles for these ad messages, which are often for products like cosmetics, sweets or anything that might be relevant during interactions with humans. This advertising is poorly disguised, and merges with sentiments that lean towards concerns of well-being, convincing people how much better off they’ll be if they make a purchase.
While the novel is futuristic, the insidious way advertising permeates daily life is resonant of how adverts show up in our world today. And these ads are directly contributing to the worsening future climate Phillips describes in her book.
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Already by the summer of 2026, Europe had seen a 57% increase in wildfires in just four years with western Europe recording the hottest ever June and July on record. We’re facing droughts and floods, as well as predicted hikes in food costs or even chronic food shortages – and that’s before the expected additional effects of a strong El Niño later this year.
Frequent flying and bigger burgers
A portion of this climate breakdown is fuelled by over-consumption in richer countries, particularly of products that are high carbon – for which advertising can take some of the blame. Research shows that adverts drive citizens to consume about a third more goods and services in general, over and above what they might have purchased.
Yet despite a clear link between promoting high-carbon behaviours and climate breakdown, little advertising regulation exists in the UK. Take frequent flying for instance, one of the most carbon-intensive activities we can partake in.
EasyJet’s latest ad campaign is called “Drop Everything”. It encourages consumers to book cheap flights departing within the next 48 hours for presumably short or weekend getaways. Rather than promoting a specific destination, “Drop Everything” promotes a mindset that encourages indiscriminate consumption of flying. The ads were shown on billboards with clever creative slogans, as well as on digital media and through influencer campaigns.
Overall, flight numbers are increasing. The UK Civil Aviation Authority reported the highest number of UK passengers in the first quarter of 2026 (more than 61 million, breaking previous records for travel between January and March). It seems we’re still not joining the dots between flying and a worsening climate.
And how about meat consumption? Scientists advocate for less meat-eating, especially beef which has the highest carbon footprint of nearly all foods. Yet adverts from McDonald’s proliferate, helping make it one of the highest-volume sellers of fast-food chain beef burgers. In 2024, the outdoor advertising budget for McDonald’s UK rose to £86 million, an increase of 71% on previous years.
Small share for sustainability
While over half of UK ad professionals feel increasingly queasy about their profession and its effects on the climate crisis, the people running the show – the UK trade bodies – prefer to focus on the growth advertising brings.
In the first three months of 2026, they stated that UK advertising spend increased by 9.3%, reaching a total of £11.7 billion for that quarter, fuelling consumption and market growth.
But how many of those adverts actually promote low carbon goods and services? Kantar’s Sustainable Ads Tracker shows the percentage of ads featuring sustainability messaging in 2026 is around 4.3%. That’s woefully low, and much of this is made up of messaging that promotes recycling.
Additionally, the ad industry continues to happily produce adverts for the large oil and gas corporations that are fuelling climate breakdown. These adverts only narrowly pass the Advertising Standards Authorities’ advertising codes, allowing the continued greenwashing of the world’s most polluting brands.
There is essentially no leadership from the UK trade bodies, likely because they are directly funded by the brands and advertisers themselves. They are essentially ‘ad shushing’ – pushing for indiscriminate growth and directing attention to their sustainability awards, while confusingly denying that adverts drive higher consumption overall.
Let’s ‘un-shush’
Where does this leave us as we are subjected to hundreds, if not thousands, of persuasive advertising messages every day that support high-carbon lifestyles? Most ad professionals are unable to push back against this agenda at work, often due to the threat of job loss. The advertising trade bodies won’t take the lead as they work in service to big brands and advertisers.
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So, who can push for the changes we need? Members of the public.
Through pressuring our city officials and governments, we can force through restrictions, such as the watershed bans on unhealthy foods on TV before 9pm in the UK. Through supporting the efforts of organisations such as Ad Free Cities and others, we can help achieve bans on outdoor advertising for fossil fuels, aviation, meat and even single-use plastics in cities and regions such as Amsterdam, The Hague, Edinburgh, Florence, Uppsala and many more.
If we’re serious about climate change and stopping big global brands pushing their high-carbon products onto us, then advertising restrictions are one of the best ways to achieve this. If we don’t want a world like the one Phillips describes in her book, we need to make our voices heard above the advertising noise.
The post Pushing the climate crisis: How advertising fuels high-carbon lifestyles appeared first on Climate Home News.
Pushing the climate crisis: How advertising fuels high-carbon lifestyles
An upcoming UK government consultation on weakening targets for electric vehicles (EVs) could cost consumers as much as £3bn a year by 2030, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
It could require the UK to import an extra 17m barrels of oil in 2030, raising expected net imports by 8%, as well as adding 2.5% to national emissions that year, the analysis shows.
After years of fierce lobbying by parts of the car industry – and despite the significant savings on offer for EV drivers – media reports suggest that EV targets could be “watered down”.
Under current rules, battery EVs – BEVs, those which run only on electricity – must make up a rising share of new car sales in the UK.
This policy, known as the “zero-emission vehicles” (ZEV) mandate, was introduced by the previous Conservative government and sets a goal for 33% BEV sales in 2026, rising to 80% in 2030.
(Carmakers are able to use “flexibilities” to help meet their targets, which reduces the effective target under the ZEV mandate to an estimated 25% of sales in 2026.)
Now, the government under new Labour prime minister Andy Burnham is reported to be considering a cut in the BEV target for 2030 to just 50% of new car sales, alongside options for 60% or 70%.
Carbon Brief understands that a consultation on weakening the ZEV mandate is being reviewed by the prime minister’s office in Number 10, ahead of being formally released.
If the mandate is weakened to 50% by 2030 – and if carmakers make more use of “flexibilities” – there could be up to 3m fewer BEVs on UK roads by 2030, according to the NGO T&E.
Previous Carbon Brief analysis found that BEVs are around £1,100 cheaper to run per year than a petrol car, thanks to far lower fuel costs.
Overall, BEVs are more than £1,000 per year cheaper to own than either petrol cars or plug-in hybrids (PHEVs, which can run on petrol or electricity).
This is according to analysis of the “total cost of ownership” by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), including purchase price, fuel costs, insurance and proposed pay-per-mile charges.
In total, Carbon Brief analysis shows that UK drivers could be hit with an extra £3bn in annual ownership costs by 2030, if the ZEV mandate is weakened, as shown below.
A weaker ZEV mandate could “put billions of pounds of committed investments at risk”, reports BusinessGreen, including in the EV charging network and battery supply chains.
Industry group Energy UK says that the mandate is “working in the way it was designed to work” and that it is the “single biggest driver of emissions reductions” in government climate plans.
However, Carbon Brief analysis shows that a weaker ZEV mandate could result in an extra 7.4m tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions (MtCO2) in 2030. This would add the equivalent of 2.5% to national emissions in 2030, under the UK’s international climate goal for that year.
In addition, a weaker ZEV mandate could result in the UK needing to import an extra 17m barrels of oil in 2030, equivalent to 8% of projected net imports that year.
Energy UK says that shifting to EVs will help to reduce household energy bills “for everyone”. This is not only through direct cost-of-ownership savings for EV drivers, but also by spreading the costs of upgrading the electricity system across a wider user base.
Car industry group the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders claims that its members are spending “blilions…on discounts, finance incentives and marketing support” and that “natural” EV demand is below the level required to meet the current ZEV mandate. Its claims are disputed.
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The post Analysis: Weaker EV targets could cost UK consumers £3bn a year by 2030 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: Weaker EV targets could cost UK consumers £3bn a year by 2030
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