Targets for climate change policy: A special case?

A recent report by the CCC (the Committee on Climate Change) made its low-key way to Parliament (‘The compatibility of UK onshore petroleum with meeting the UK’s carbon budgets’). In it a key message: shale gas exploitation, commonly known as ‘fracking’, if it is carried out on a significant scale, will be incompatible with the UK’s climate change targets. To be clear, this means for instance that both the UK carbon budgets, and the 2050 commitment to reducing emissions by at least 80% would be compromised. This will happen, the report states, unless three fundamental conditions are met: strictly limiting emissions in the phases of development, production and decommissioning of wells; keeping gas consumption within the limits defined by the budgets; and fitting emissions from shale gas production into the existing carbon budgets.