The government’s net zero strategy will “support up to 440,000 jobs” by 2030, a business minister has said – as he announced a move towards the end of the sale of new petrol and diesel cars.
The new plan, published on Tuesday, has the intention of dramatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions to reach the government’s aim of net zero by 2050.
It comes less than two weeks before world leaders will meet at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow to discuss how to reduce the effects of climate change.
Image: It is the government’s “ambition” that no gas boilers will be sold by 2035
Making a statement on the government’s aims in the Commons, Greg Hands told MPs the strategy “is not just an environmental transition, it represents an important economic change too”.
But Greenpeace UK’s head of politics, Rebecca Newsom, described the government’s strategy as “more like a pick and mix than the substantial meal that we need to reach net zero”.
Advertisement
Announcements in the strategy include:
• An aim to fully decarbonise the power system by 2035
More on Cop26
Related Topics:
• Path towards all heating appliances in homes and workplaces from 2035 being low carbon
• An “ambition” that by 2035 no new gas boilers will be sold
• £450m three-year Boiler Upgrade Scheme to offer households grants for low-carbon heating systems
• £60m Heat Pump Ready programme
• To secure a decision on a large-scale nuclear plant by 2024
• 40GW of offshore wind by 2030
• To deliver 5GW of hydrogen production capacity by 2030 while halving oil and gas emissions
• To end sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030 with £620m for zero emission vehicle grants
• £2bn investment to help half of journeys in towns and cities to be cycled or walked by 2030
• £120m to develop small modular nuclear reactors
A review published by the Treasury says “the costs of global inaction significantly outweigh the costs of action” to tackle climate change.
The document, released alongside the government’s net zero strategy, says it is not possible to forecast how individual household finances will be hit over the course of a 30-year transition to net zero greenhouse gas emissions.
Image: Ministers have set a target of 40GW of offshore wind by 2030
Mr Hands told the Commons the strategy will see the UK government fully embracing the “green industrial revolution” and will help the UK “to level up” and “get to the front of the global race to go green”.
“We need to capitalise on this to ensure British industries and workers benefit,” he said.
“I can therefore announce that the strategy will support up to 440,000 jobs across sectors and across all parts of the UK in 2030.
“There’ll be more specialists in low carbon fuels in Northern Ireland and low carbon hydrogen in Sheffield.
“Electric vehicle battery production in the North East of England, engineers in Wales, green finance in London and offshore wind technicians in Scotland.
“This strategy will harness the power of the private sector, giving businesses and industry the certainty they need to invest and grow in the UK to make the UK home to new ambitious projects.
“The policies and spending brought forward in the strategy along with regulations will leverage up to £90 billion of private investment by 2030 levelling up our former industrial heartlands.”
Image: The government say they want half of journeys in towns and cities to be cycled or walked by 2030
The business minister, who is in charge of the energy brief, told MPs that switching to cleaner sources of energy will reduce Britain’s reliance on fossil fuels and will “bring down costs down the line”.
Mr Hands added that the government “will also introduce a zero emission vehicle mandate that will deliver our 2030 commitment to end the sale of new petrol and diesel cars”.
In strategy documents released on Tuesday, the government says it will invest £620m in grants for electric vehicles and street charging points.
Ministers are also promising an additional £350m to help the automotive supply chain transition to electric.
Vehicle manufacturers will also be made to sell a proportion of clean cars every year, the plans also reveal.
Referring to the government’s strategy as “half-hearted policies”, Greenpeace UK’s Ms Newsom said: “With just eight years left to halve global emissions, the government can’t just keep dining out on its ‘ambitious targets’. Until the policy and funding gaps are closed, Boris Johnson’s plea to other countries to deliver on their promises at the global climate conference next month will be easy to ignore.”
Image: Energy minister Greg Hands said the strategy will help the UK ‘get to the front of the global race to go green’
Shadow energy secretary Ed Miliband said the plan “falls short on delivery” and that “there is nothing like the commitment we believe is required”.
He added: “The Chancellor’s fingerprints are all over these documents and not in a good way. So we’ve waited months for the heat and buildings strategy – it is a massive let down.”
Shaun Spiers, executive director at Green Alliance, said “mandating car manufacturers to sell more clean vehicles, supporting the switch to heat pumps and cleaning up our energy grid are essential steps to cutting emissions over the coming decade”.
He added: “But we need a more ambitious response from the chancellor at the spending review to turn these promises into jobs, growth and benefits to consumers – and if the government truly wants to level up the country, we’ll need much more investment once the dust has settled on the COP26 Glasgow climate summit.”
David Wright, chief engineer at National Grid, said the government needs to set out what tackling climate change “means in practice”.
“We’re at a critical stage in the journey where net zero is possible with the technologies and opportunities we have today and, in order to deliver on this, we have to accelerate and ramp up efforts to deploy long-term solutions at scale,” he said.
If you ever fly to Washington DC, look out of the window as you land at Dulles Airport – and you might snatch a glimpse of the single biggest story in economics right now.
There below you, you will see scattered around the fields and woods of the local area a set of vast warehouses that might to the untrained eye look like supermarkets or distribution centres. But no: these are in fact data centres – the biggest concentration of data centres anywhere in the world.
For this area surrounding Dulles Airport has more of these buildings, housing computer servers that do the calculations to train and run artificial intelligence (AI), than anywhere else. And since AI accounts for the vast majority of economic growth in the US so far this year, that makes this place an enormous deal.
Down at ground level you can see the hallmarks as you drive around what is known as “data centre alley”. There are enormous power lines everywhere – a reminder that running these plants is an incredibly energy-intensive task.
This tiny area alone, Loudoun County, consumes roughly 4.9 gigawatts of power – more than the entire consumption of Denmark. That number has already tripled in the past six years, and is due to be catapulted ever higher in the coming years.
Inside ‘data centre alley’
We know as much because we have gained rare access into the heart of “data centre alley”, into two sites run by Digital Realty, one of the biggest datacentre companies in the world. It runs servers that power nearly all the major AI and cloud services in the world. If you send a request to one of those models or search engines there’s a good chance you’ve unknowingly used their machines yourself.
Image: Inside a site run by Digital Realty
Their Digital Dulles site, under construction right now, is due to consume up to a gigawatt in power all told, with six substations to help provide that power. Indeed, it consumes about the same amount of power as a large nuclear power plant.
Walking through the site, a series of large warehouses, some already equipped with rows and rows of backup generators, there to ensure the silicon chips whirring away inside never lose power, is a striking experience – a reminder of the physical underpinnings of the AI age. For all that this technology feels weightless, it has enormous physical demands. It entails the construction of these massive concrete buildings, each of which needs enormous amounts of power and water to keep the servers cool.
We were given access inside one of the company’s existing server centres – behind multiple security cordons into rooms only accessible with fingerprint identification. And there we saw the infrastructure necessary to keep those AI chips running. We saw an Nvidia DGX H100 running away, in a server rack capable of sucking in more power than a small village. We saw the cooling pipes running in and out of the building, as well as the ones which feed coolant into the GPUs (graphic processing units) themselves.
Such things underline that to the extent that AI has brainpower, it is provided not out of thin air, but via very physical amenities and infrastructure. And the availability of that infrastructure is one of the main limiting factors for this economic boom in the coming years.
According to economist Jason Furman, once you subtract AI and related technologies, the US economy barely grew at all in the first half of this year. So much is riding on this. But there are some who question whether the US is going to be able to construct power plants quickly enough to fuel this boom.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
2:08
Is Trump’s AI plan a ‘tech bro’ manifesto?
For years, American power consumption remained more or less flat. That has changed rapidly in the past couple of years. Now, AI companies have made grand promises about future computing power, but that depends on being able to plug those chips into the grid.
Last week the International Monetary Fund’s chief economist, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, warned AI could indeed be a financial bubble.
He said: “There are echoes in the current tech investment surge of the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. It was the internet then… it is AI now. We’re seeing surging valuations, booming investment and strong consumption on the back of solid capital gains. The risk is that with stronger investment and consumption, a tighter monetary policy will be needed to contain price pressures. This is what happened in the late 1990s.”
‘The terrifying thing is…’
For those inside the AI world, this also feels like uncharted territory.
Helen Toner, executive director of Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, and formerly on the OpenAI board, said: “The terrifying thing is: no one knows how much further AI is going to go, and no one really knows how much economic growth is going to come out of it.
“The trends have certainly been that the AI systems we are developing get more and more sophisticated over time, and I don’t see signs of that stopping. I think they’ll keep getting more advanced. But the question of how much productivity growth will that create? How will that compare to the absolutely gobsmacking investments that are being made today?”
Whether it’s a new industrial revolution or a bubble – or both – there’s no denying AI is a massive economic story with massive implications.
For energy. For materials. For jobs. We just don’t know how massive yet.
Pizza Hut is to close 68 restaurants and 11 delivery sites with the loss of more than 1,200 jobs after the company behind its UK venues fell into administration.
The company has said 1,210 workers are being made redundant as part of the closures.
DC London Pie, the firm running Pizza Hut’s restaurants in the UK, appointed administrators from corporate finance firm FTI on Monday.
It comes less than a year after the business bought the chain’s restaurants from insolvency.
On Monday, American hospitality giant Yum! Brands, which owns the global Pizza Hut business, said it had bought the UK restaurant operation in a pre-pack administration deal – a rescue deal that will save 64 sites and secure the future of 1,276 workers.
A spokesperson for Pizza Hut UK confirmed the Yum! deal and said as a result it was “pleased to secure the continuation of 64 sites to safeguard our guest experience and protect the associated jobs.
“Approximately 2,259 team members will transfer to the new Yum! equity business under UK TUPE legislation, including above-restaurant leaders and support teams.”
Nicolas Burquier, Managing Director of Pizza Hut Europe and Canada, called Monday’s agreement a “targeted acquisition” which, he said, “aims to safeguard our guest experience and protect jobs where possible.
“Our immediate priority is operational continuity at the acquired locations and supporting colleagues through the transition.”
The administration came after HMRC filed a winding up petition on Friday against DC London Pie.
DC London Pie was the company formed after Directional Capital, which operated franchises in Sweden and Denmark, snapped up 139 UK restaurants from the previous UK franchisee Heart with Smart Limited in January of this year.
Staff at the Bank of England are on alert for potential job cuts in Threadneedle Street after the governor, Andrew Bailey, warned of tough decisions about the institution’s future cost base.
Sky News has learnt that Mr Bailey informed Bank of England employees in a memo last week that it was taking a detailed look at costs, although it did not specifically refer to the prospect of redundancies.
One source said the memo had been sent while Mr Bailey was attending the International Monetary Fund (IMF) meeting in Washington.
Its precise wording was unclear on Monday, but one source said it had warned of “tough choices” that would need to be made as the bank accelerated its investment in new technology.
They added that managers had been briefed to expect to have to make savings of between 6% and 8% of their operating budgets.
The Bank of England employed 5,810 people at the end of February, of whom just over 5,000 were full-time, according to its annual report.
Those numbers were marginally higher than in the previous year.
The central bank’s budget, funded through a levy, is expected to be £596m in the current financial year.
The workforce figures include the Prudential Regulation Authority, Britain’s main banking regulator, which is set to get a new boss next year when Sam Woods steps down after two terms in the role.
A Bank of England spokesperson declined to comment on the contents of Mr Bailey’s memo.
They also declined to provide details of the timing of any previous rounds of redundancies at the bank.