Hot Air and Cold Feet: The UK Response to Climate Change

Abstract

Prior to the election of New Labour in 1997, the previous Conservative administration began a series of policy initiatives that inadvertently contributed to major reductions in UK greenhouse gas emissions. The then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was persuaded in 1988 that climate change posed dangers to both national security and the economy, and delivered landmark speeches to the Royal Society and at the United Nations. She also encouraged the formation of the Hadley Centre in 1990 and a decade later the Tyndall Centre, two of the world’s premier climate research institutes. During the mid-1980s Thatcher also presided over a bitter dispute with the coal miners which culminated in the phasing out of much of Britain’s coal production, followed in 1990 by the Conservative privatization of the UK electricity industry. These essentially political events precipitated a major shift in UK energy production from coal to low-price gas, allowing subsequent governments to claim that the UK was on course to meet its Kyoto target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 12.5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2008-2012. The demise of heavy engineering sectors in the early 1990s added to the UK’s beneficial but serendipitous emissions reductions, while the introduction of an ‘escalator’ on road-fuel taxes in 1994 (later dropped) further added to the Tory contribution.