The Climate Change Committee was set up by Part 2 of the Climate Change Act 2008, specifically section 32, with additional provisions in Schedule 1. Section 38(1)(c) provides for it to “at the request of a national authority, provide advice, analysis, information or other assistance to the authority in connection with…adaptation to climate change…”. This is in addition to its duties to advise with regard to carbon budgets, aviation, shipping etc. Its latest adaptation report has recently been published, and noticed by the BBC and the Guardian with rather less enthusiasm, it seemed to me, than is the case with regard to its shouting about carbon targets and the like.
As a brief digression, who knew that section 39(2)(d) empowers the Committee to accept gifts? I wonder if they have done so, and if they have, who the donors were and why the gifts were made?
But back to the latest adaptation report. The BBC’s take on it is neatly summed up in its headline: “Government not taking climate seriously – advisers”. The article is worth a read, but for me the critical section comes at the end:
At the heart of these discussions is the question of cost.
But putting off efforts to prepare the UK for the changing climate in an attempt to save cash would be “a huge mistake” and could increase economic damage in the long run, Baroness Brown said.
“We are very worried about their spending review,” she added, in an unusually strong plea from the Committee.
“This is not a tomorrow problem; it’s a today problem. If we don’t address it today, it becomes a disaster tomorrow.”
A freedom of information request submitted by the BBC found there are just 18 members of staff working fully on climate adaptation at the Department for Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra).
That’s just 0.3% of Defra’s nearly 6,600 full-time-equivalent core staff.
Defra said some of these employees also worked on climate adaptation part-time, and the figures don’t include those working in other parts of government.
The Guardian report is in similar vein, with its headline: “Labour not protecting people, economy and homes from climate crisis, watchdog says – Plans to protect UK from extreme weather are inadequate, Climate Change Committee says in scathing assessment”. Needless to say the Guardian article was probably less analytical and chose to conclude with quotes from Greenpeace and from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit.
The Report itself is huge, and although I always urge readers to consult the original material rather than rely on summaries prepared by others, it would be a brave person (or one with time on their hands) who decides to read it from start to finish. I confess that on this occasion I haven’t done so either, but one paragraph did resonate deeply with me:
Continued climate change is inevitable. Current projections for global greenhouse gas emissions indicate that warming is expected to exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels in the early 2030s. Global warming is currently on track for around 2°C by the 2050s with the possibility of significant further warming by the end of the century. However, the potential for strengthened global mitigation ambition means that maintaining warming to well-below 2°C remains plausible. In the UK, further global warming is expected to bring rising sea-levels, warmer and wetter winters, and drier and hotter summers with more intense heatwaves and localised extreme rainfall.
Why am I highlighting this? Because, being a creature of the Climate Change Act, one assumes that the Committee is aware of the content of the Impact Assessment that was produced when the Act when through Parliament. And, as I pointed out in Read it and Weep on page 7 (of 126), that impact assessment includes this:
It should be noted that the benefits of reduced carbon emissions have been valued using the social cost of carbon which estimates the avoided global damages from reduced UK emissions. The benefits of UK action will be distributed across the globe. In the case where the UK acts in concert with other countries then the UK will benefit from other nations reduced emissions and would be expected to experience a large net benefit. Where the UK acts alone, though there would be a net benefit for the world as a whole the UK would bear all the cost of the action and would not experience any benefit from reciprocal reductions elsewhere. The economic case for the UK continuing to act alone where global action cannot be achieved would be weak.
And yet in the UK we have a government ever more determined to plough on with its net zero agenda and rapid decarbonisation of the grid at massive expense regardless of the fact that the rest of the world isn’t following its “leadership”.
Surely, then, the responsibility of the Climate Change Committee is to draw to the attention of the relevant Secretary of State (one Mr Miliband) the fact that the impact assessment (which he signed at the time) demonstrates quite clearly that pressing on with unilateral greenhouse gas emissions reduction is a seriously flawed strategy, one where the economic case is weak. Given the costs of a flawed climate change mitigation strategy, with a weak economic underpinning, it would be better to stop wasting that money and to spend some or all of it on adaptation, where the economic case would be much greater and the benefits to UK citizens would be obvious rather than speculative. This is what we sceptics have said all along. It would be nice if the Climate Change Committee did its job and pointed this out. It would be nicer still if Mr Miliband remembered what he put his name to in 2008.
Climate Scepticism 
As I may have mentioned elsewhere, it looks as if answering inequality is today’s excuse for Net Zero, and it may be the last excuse standing in the end. I’m sure I scoffed when people suggested that Net Zero was a socialist Trojan Horse. But it might be becoming one.
The original case, absent binding international agreement, was not just weak, it was non-existent. The paragraph you quote makes that clear, in fact it makes clear that cutting emissions under the Climate Change Act is a net harm in those circumstances, but it then dribbles to a halt with the best word they could get away with without either lying or undermining it altogether, “weak.”
Things like flood defences are likely to offer better value. Re-foresting the hills costs nothing – you just have to stop burning them for grouse shooting.
Meanwhile, if no-one reads their reports, the bureaucracy is grinning from ear to ear!
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Jit,
Even the last excuse standing is a poor one. So far as I can see its effect so far has been to redistribute money from the poor to the better-off, via subsidies for things that poor people can’t afford, such as heat pumps and EVs.
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Mark – thanks for the reminder (again) about what the “Climate Change Act” actually stated.
As you say & Jit’s comment alludes to – “pressing on with unilateral greenhouse gas emissions reduction is a seriously flawed strategy, one where the economic case is weak.”
I doubt anyone involved on the CCC have ever bothered to read the Act, they just follow the UK NZ dogma/obsession without thinking about the “practicalities.
“Where the UK acts alone, though there would be a net benefit for the world as a whole the UK would bear all the cost of the action and would not experience any benefit from reciprocal reductions elsewhere.“
What a joke statement.
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The Climate Change Committee is neither “independent”, nor interested in climate. It provides the credo for pre-determined government policy and is heavily conflicted, both now and since its inception. Eg, Baroness Brown, amongst other roles such as Chair of the Carbon Trust, is a non exec director of Ørsted for which she receives £55,000 p.a. She has a rich history:
21st May 2019 “The Offshore Wind Industry Council says a major programme of work has just begun to ensure that the UK’s low-carbon energy system makes the best use of the increasingly large proportion of electricity we are generating from renewable sources, including offshore wind.
The task force…is led by Baroness Brown of Cambridge, the industry’s Offshore Wind Sector Champion, and includes senior representatives from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the Scottish Government, the Committee on Climate Change, National Grid, the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult, the Energy Systems Catapult, Atkins, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and companies including ITM, Good Energy, Shell, Equinor, Vattenfall and Ørsted.” (She then became a director of Ørsted)
Subsidy King Drax, until a couple of years ago, was represented on the committee by Rebecca Heaton, at the time their “Sustainability Director”.
The first chairman of the CCC in 2008 was Lord Adair Turner and that same year he also became chair of the Financial Standards Authority. On February 5th 2009, FSA diary records showed that Lord Turner had breakfast with US billionaire George Soros. Later that year Soros announced at the Copenhagen Climate Conference that he would invest $1 billion in clean-energy technology and create an organization to advise policy makers on environmental issues, according to a Bloomberg report at the time.
Lord Turner left the CCC in 2012, ostensibly to devote more time to the Financial Standards Authority, but in 2013 when his FSA term ended, he became chairman of INET, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, set up by Soros in 2009 with $50 million, where he is currently a “Senior Fellow and Grantee, INET”
Soros is now represented on the Climate Change Committee by a guy called Stephen Fries from the Institute for New Economic Thinking, (INET). Fries is actually from its subsidiary at Oxford Martin School, set up in 2010. He was group chief economist at Shell (2006–11; 2016–21) and chief economist at the Department of Energy and Climate Change from 2011–16, when he went back to Shell, but is now at Oxford INET.
Another “independent” CCC member is Ben Caldecott of the Smith School at Oxford:
“Former Vice President at investment bank Climate Change Capital, former Research Director for Environment and Energy at the think tank Policy Exchange; was also Head of Government Advisory at Bloomberg New Energy Finance; a Director in the Strategy Directorate of the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (on secondment); as a Deputy Director in the Strategy Directorate of the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change (on secondment); as an Advisor to The Prince of Wales’ International Sustainability Unit; as Sherpa to the UK Green Investment Bank Commission; and as the Senior Advisor to the Chair and CEO of the UK Green Finance Institute. He also served as a Trustee of the Green Alliance from 2010 to 2022.”
(Advisory Council for the Smith School includes Al Gore’s business partner David Blood, Ben Goldsmith, James Thornton, (CEO of lawfare outfit ClientEarth) and the ubiquitous Adair Turner of the afore-mentioned Soros Institute for New Economic Thinking.)
This is just scratching the surface and I didn’t even mention Lord Deben.
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Dennis,
Please accept my apologies. I have just found your comment lurking in pending and set it free.
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That’s OK Mark, it was just this morning.
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This is interesting, since it suggests that climate litigation (at least with regard to the UK) is pivoting from complaining about inadequate efforts to reduce emissions (i.e. mitigation) to complaining about inadequate adaptation measures. Of course, we sceptics have always said that mitigation is futile, and adaptation is the sensible course. Are they finally catching up with us and acknowledging that we have been right all along? The sad thing is that the £hundreds of billions spent on futile mitigation efforts are no longer available for adaptation and the country is skint.
“Two Britons to challenge UK’s ‘weak’ response to climate crisis in Strasbourg court
Doug Paulley and Kevin Jordan say their lives being ruined, and lack of effective strategy infringes their human rights”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/05/two-britons-to-challenge-uk-weak-response-to-climate-crisis-in-european-echr-court
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