In the midst of a Tory battle over Britain’s carbon-reduction targets and the policies being used to get there, the last Labour leader to win a General Election sounded a note of caution. Britain’s diminishing contribution to global CO2 emissions poses new questions in the fight against climate change, he suggested.
“It’s the single biggest global challenge, right, and Britain should play its part in that. But its part frankly is going to be less to do with Britain’s emissions. I mean, one year’s rise in China’s emissions would outscore the whole of Britain’s emissions for a year,” the former Labour leader said in a magazine interview.
He said “it shouldn’t be” an excuse to slack off on cutting emissions, but added that cutting our own carbon should not be the main focus:
“Don’t ask us to do a huge amount when frankly whatever we do in Britain is not really going to impact climate change,” he said.
So how do Britain’s emissions stack up against China’s?
First of all, headline emissions.
As an early leader in the industrial revolution and worker of miracles with coal power, Britain churned out more CO2 emissions than China until the 1950s, and was comprehensively overtaken in the 1970s.
Taking on the mantle of the workshop of the world in the 1990s and 2000s, China turned out six-times more CO2 than the UK in 2000, according to Our World In Data, rising to more than 16-times Britain’s in 2010, and 33-times by 2021.
That is in part a result of the UK cutting back – British emissions are down by two-fifths since the turn of the millennium – but mostly growth in China’s output.
How fast are its emissions rising?
Sir Tony was correct to note that in some years the rise in China’s annual emissions have indeed been greater than Britain’s total CO2 output.
Most recently this was true in 2021 – 2022’s figures are not yet available – and in 2019, before Covid disruption took hold.
For decades it was the case that China’s emissions were higher than the UK’s not because it had reached the same level of wealth – as a rough pattern, getting rich for a long time meant producing more emissions – but because it had a larger population.
In 2021, Britain’s emissions per capita stood at 5.2 tonnes – excluding Covid-stricken 2020, that is the lowest level since the 1850s. China’s, by contrast, hit a record high of just over 8 tonnes per head.
In part this is a function of the UK growing its services sector while China exported more manufactured goods to the rest of the world. Nonetheless, it suggests a remarkably carbon-intensive economy, and one which is heading in the wrong direction.
Then there is the cause of the emissions. Britain, once the champion of coal, has almost eliminated the heavily polluting fuel. Coal emissions have been falling since the 1950s and are now down at levels last seen in the late 18th century.
China has been moving in the other direction.
While Britain’s coal emissions have fallen to around 24m tonnes per year, China’s have surged to almost 8bn, around 20-times the peak annual quantity produced by Britain last century and an intimidatingly large quantity by any measurement.
If not obsessing over emissions, what does Sir Tony think the UK should be focusing on?
Instead, he suggests Britain should play to its economic strengths: finance.
As an alternative to the current row over who should pay what and how much heat pumps cost, it might seem refreshing to have a suggestion that we can sell something to the rest of the world.
It also differs from suggestions the UK should try to outcompete the US and EU in throwing massive subsidies at building green industries in an effort to catch up with China’s headstart.
“The number one issue today – and this is where Britain could play a part – is how do you finance the energy transition?” he asked.
“Because, basically, the developed world’s emissions are going down, but the developing world’s are going up. These countries have got to grow, so how do you finance the transition? Secondly, how do you accelerate the technology?”
When it comes to Britain’s potential advantages in greening the world economy, climate specialists suspect the UK’s financial edge could be valuable, but only alongside pressure to cut emissions further.
“We have all of these comparative advantages here, and we are kind of frittering them away a bit,” says Laurie Laybourn, an environmental policy researcher.
“The UK reducing its emissions, whether or not they are bigger or smaller than China, is a way of focusing our agenda on maximising those amazing capabilities we have in Britain, like our financial services, and that we are amazingly good at inventing things.”
As things are, he fears China has realised that dominating renewables will turn it into an economic winner, even as it keeps burning fossil fuels. Renewables will drive China’s growth as coal powered Britain’s industrial revolution, and oil delivered American hegemony in the 20th century, he suggests.
“The big winner on the key energy sources of the day is a big economic winner,” he says.
