In December, world leaders will meet at Copenhagen to decide on a make or break agreement on Climate Change.
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Why Labour?
Labour is leading at home and abroad on action to tackle the threat of climate change, and on creating new jobs in low carbon industries. We are building a clean and secure energy mix, with renewables, clean coal and nuclear power playing key roles, while helping people to save energy and money, while staying warmer, by helping with insulation and other energy-efficiency measures.
Labour aims to make Britain a leader in green technology, manufacturing and services – with the growth of a low carbon economy central to Britain’s future economic success. We will see 1.2 million people in green jobs by the end of the current decade.
We will remain a key player in international negotiations on climate change and strive to turn the Accord agreed at Copenhagen into a legally binding international agreement.
Key achievements:
- Became the world’s first country to adopt legally binding, long-term targets for reducing our greenhouse emissions, with a target of an 80 per cent reduction by 2050.
- We now have more offshore wind capacity than any country in the world. Wind last year provided the electricity for 2 million homes.
- Our action has helped to insulate over 5 million homes
- We created a supplier obligation, now known as the Carbon Emissions Reduction Target (CERT), which has delivered carbon savings and an estimated £2bn in household energy efficiency investment between 2002 and 2008.
- We have created the Clean Energy Cash Back scheme, a ‘feed-in tariff’ to reward people and groups who generate their own low-carbon energy
A future fair for all:
- We aim to give a quarter of British homes a full eco-makeover by 2020
- Every home will have a smart meter by 2020, making it easier to cut energy use and save money on bills.
- By 2012 a further 6 million households will have been helped with insulation.
- By 2011 we will have phased out high-energy light bulbs in favour of energy efficient ones.
- Following the introduction of our Clean Energy Cash Back scheme, we will introduce a similar scheme in 2011 to encourage people to switch from conventional heating sources to renewable heat such as ground source heat pumps and solar thermal, which will provide savings over the longer term.
- Under our ambitious policies to support carbon capture and storage technology, all new coal-fired power stations will be required to include CCS demonstration, and once the technology has been proven, we will require every coal-fired power station to retrofit CCS within five years