Dr James Richardson, director of analysis at the Climate Change Committee (CCC), took on climate action sceptics at the CIHT conference this week, stating that it is 'wrong to say that net zero is an arbitrary target'.

With a possible shift in public mood on net zero, which has even seen local authorities warned against using the term, Dr Richardson said that 'there is a strong scientific basis for the targets that we have and that we are working towards in this country'. 

Referring to CO2 levels over the past 800,000 years, he highlighted how quickly levels have spiked and exceeded a ceiling that was maintained for thousands of years.

Data showed that the country had met its carbon targets for 2010, 2015 and 2020 however, with the UK seemingly on track to meet its 2050 goal of net zero.

The surface transport sector is the largest carbon emitting sector, overtaking the previous leader – the energy sector – which is now far lower down in sixth place.

Discussing a graph created by the CCC that shows how the sector can reduce its carbon output, Dr Richardson stated: ‘An awful lot of this can be achieved by the electrification of the vehicle fleet, and we think that can be done pretty fast. HGVs, of course, will come later; it'll be cars first, then vans, then HGVs.'

He went on to say that modal shift was 'a relatively small part of the overall story,' but added that the CCC was 'quite aggressive in our assumptions here about how much more you can switch people onto public transport.'

The challenge, he suggested, was that the easiest journeys to shift were also the shortest and so have less impact than wider electrification plans.

While Dr Richardson referred to electricity as the ‘secret sauce of decarbonisation', there were some in the audience who argued in favour of other options, such as the use of hydrogen to store electricity. Dr Richardson responded that hydrogen was ‘not very efficient'.

‘A battery is a much more efficient way of storing electricity,' he argued, ‘than "round tripping hydrogen". Turning electricity into hydrogen and back into electricity is a pretty inefficient way of doing things.'

‘Fundamentally,' he added, ‘almost no investment is going into hydrogen vehicles. The market has chosen electric.'

More is needed

Despite the emphasis put on reaching net zero, Dr Richardson said it wouldn't be enough: ‘The climate is still changing further; climate change is inevitable. We can't simply stop all emissions across the economy tomorrow, so this is baked in, even on the assumption that we get ourselves to net zero.'

Data showed that, based on current projections, we are likely to see around two degrees of warming by 2050, so with that in mind, he argued that we need to start planning our transport networks to function under these conditions.

‘When we're thinking about managing risk, we don't want to kind of assume the best scenario, right? So, we think it is sensible to plan on the basis of two degrees of warming by 2050.'

He concluded: ‘Transport is doing better at planning for these things than most of the sectors we see across the economy...and I do want to pay credit to people who are developing really good plans, understanding their assets, figuring out what to do, and starting to get that done. The problem is we're just not doing it fast enough under enough scale to keep up with the problem.

‘We need better drainage, we need better flood protection from rivers. We need to think about the surfacing that we use for heat. There are lots of things that we can do.'