A government source linked article published in February this year highlighted cuts to UK emissions resulting from changes in power generation practices – namely, switching from coal to a combination of gas and renewables. The source referenced a 1990-2018 dataset released by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).
For this article, we investigated a further dataset (1990-2017) released by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA). Importantly it also considers emissions embedded within imports. In contrast to the BEIS dataset (which purports a 43% emissions reduction between 1990-2018), total UK emissions when considering those imports fell to a lesser degree, by 16%.
Further observations using this dataset are provided in an article published by The University of Manchester, where the author considers the datapoints between 1997-2016, which are considered more reliable datapoints. In brief, whilst GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions from UK production fell, a large part of this was offset by an increase in the consumption of imports (where MtCO2e is million tonnes of CO2 equivalent):
• UK production emissions – down 35% (431-282MtCO2e).
• Embedded import emissions – up 43% (277-355MtCO2e).
• Household emissions – down 12% (89-78MtCO2e).
• Road transport emissions – up 6% (65-69MtCO2e).
This highlights how different datasets and ranges, subject to where boundaries are set, can (intentionally or not) obfuscate simple truths. Offshoring emissions does not make them unaccountable. The revival of UK energy and industry with a focus on minimising emissions intensity will help to deliver the UK’s net zero ambition, and in the process create a valuable export – the know-how.