2019 was an extraordinary year for UK activism on the climate crisis. Extinction Rebellion’s April 2019 rebellion, the school strikes and David Attenborough’s BBC documentary Climate Change: The Facts all helped to radically shift public opinion. June 2019 polling from YouGov found “the public is more concerned about the environment than ever before.”

“The sudden surge in concern is undoubtedly boosted by the publicity raised for the environmental cause by Extinction Rebellion… and activism from Greta Thunberg during the same period,” Matthew Smith, YouGov’s lead data journalist, explained.

More concretely, the House of Commons declared a “climate emergency” in May 2019. Introducing the motion, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said the recent climate activism had been “a massive and necessary wake-up call. Today we have the opportunity to say ‘we hear you’.”

The motion — one of the first in the world — showed the will of Parliament but didn’t legally compel the government to act.

Then, in June 2019, following a recommendation from the Climate Change Committee (CCC), the Tory government committed the country to reducing all greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. This move made Britain the first major economy in the world to pass a law to end its contribution to global warming by 2050.

Be in no doubt: Parliament declaring a climate emergency and the government implementing a 2050 net zero target are huge wins for Britain’s environmental movement. However, speaking to the Morning Star in June 2019, Extinction Rebellion spokesperson Rupert Read called the CCC report which recommended the 2050 net zero target, “essentially dead on arrival.” And in September 2019 Ed Miliband said “2050 isn’t the radical position and now it’s seen as a conservative ‘small c’ position.”

So what are the problems with the 2050 net zero target?

First, the CCC’s 2050 target is derived from the October 2018 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report on 1.5°C — the maximum increase in temperature the 189 signatories of the 2016 UN Paris climate agreement pledged to limit global warming to.

However, as many climate experts have noted, the IPCC tends to be conservative in its predictions. “This is simply due to its structure,” Dr Stefan Rahmstorf from the Potsdam University noted in 2014. “The IPCC report will contain only things that a whole group of scientists have agreed upon on a kind of consensus process. This kind of agreement tends to be the lowest common denominator.”

He noted that sea level rise in the last two decades “has overtaken the speed of the upper range of previous projections of sea level of the IPCC.” Writing in Business Green in May 2019, Will Dawson from Forum For The Future explained the ramifications of this: “The CCC is therefore using scenarios that are likely far too optimistic. Emissions have to be cut much faster than they assumed to keep to 1.5°C.”

Second, the CCC admits the 2050 target, “if replicated across the world,” would deliver only a greater than 50 per cent chance of limiting global warming to 1.5°C — reckless odds when you are talking about the fate of hundreds of millions of people.

Indeed, Kevin Anderson, Professor of Energy and Climate Change at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, recently stated: “The problem is the framing the CCC has for net zero is already far removed from what is needed to meet our Paris commitments.”

Anderson has co-authored new research, published in the peer-reviewed Climate Policy journal, highlighting this disconnect. The Guardian summarised the article’s key finding: “Britain’s planned reductions in emissions, even if it hits net zero by 2050, would be two or three times greater than its fair share of emissions under the landmark 2015 Paris agreement.”

Finally, the CCC report on 2050 is based on various questionable political assumptions. For example, the CCC admits the target date is partly informed by what is “feasible” and “politically acceptable” — and what is “credibly deliverable alongside other government objectives.”

The CCC also has a very conservative view about the possibility of large-scale behavioural change, with Chris Stark, the CCC’s chief executive, stating the 2050 target “is technically possible with known technologies and without major changes to consumer behaviours.”

The report recommends a hardly radical “20 per cent reduction in consumption of beef, lamb and dairy” (to be “replaced by an increase in consumption of pork, poultry and plant-based products”) and predicts a 60 per cent growth in demand for air travel by 2050. They advise the government to curtail this surge rather than cut demand overall.

In short, the 2050 target date is not simply following the science but is underpinned by conservative assumptions about the likelihood of change and intangible and changeable factors like public opinion and government priorities.

Worryingly, like a Russian doll the serious problems with the 2050 target sit within an even more concerning national and international policy context.

In its June 2020 progress report the CCC confirmed the steps Britain government has taken “do not yet measure up to meet the size of the net zero challenge and we are not making adequate progress in preparing for climate change.”

A new report from the Institute for Government is similarly critical of the government’s lack of action. “There is… little evidence that the government and the politicians who waved the new target through with little debate, have confronted the enormous scale of the task ahead,” it notes.

Internationally, one of the most frightening facts I have ever read was effectively hidden in paragraph 13 of 19 of a page 27 report in the Guardian in July.

“According to the Climate Action Tracker, only Morocco [out of 189 signatories] is acting consistently with the [2016] Paris agreement’s goals, with the global temperature rise on course to exceed 3°C by the end of the century even if the current pledges are met.”

Meanwhile the mercury keeps rising. Earlier this month the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation warned the world could exceed the key threshold of 1.5°C by 2024, climate experts Pep Canadell and Rob Jackson noted on The Conversation website.

According to a leaked January 2020 report from US multinational investment bank JP Morgan, the Earth is on track for a temperature increase of 3.5°C by 2100. “Although precise predictions are not possible, it is clear that the Earth is on an unsustainable trajectory,” the paper notes. “Something will have to change at some point if the human race is going to survive.”

We need, then, to massively increase the level of ambition and action of Britain’s response to the climate crisis. Professor Anderson argues the scale and timeframe of the transformation required needs to be larger and faster than Roosevelt’s New Deal or the Marshall Plan to reconstruct Europe after World War Two.

A positive step would be the adoption of an earlier net zero target date. Both Mark Maslin, professor of climatology at University College London and Tim Jackson, professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey, back a net zero target of 2030.

Under Corbyn’s leadership a Green New Deal with a target date of 2030 was approved at the 2019 annual Labour Party conference (though didn’t fully make it into the party’s December 2019 general election manifesto). Impressively, in July Ed Miliband, now the shadow business and energy secretary, confirmed he backs the 2030 target date.

The Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill recently tabled by Green MP Caroline Lucas and co-sponsored by a group of 11 cross-party MPs is another ray of light, encapsulating many of the concerns about Britain’s lack of ambition set out above. Co-drafted by Professor Anderson and Professor Jackson — and already backed by 52 other MPs — the Bill pushes for a strengthening of Britain’s response the climate crisis, ensuring British emissions are consistent with limiting average global temperatures to 1.5°C.

Asked at Davos in January what she would like to see happen in the next year and a half, climate activist Greta Thunberg gave a typically wise answer: “That we start listening to the science and that we actually start treating the crisis as the crisis it is,” because “without treating this as a real crisis we cannot solve it.”

Ian Sinclair tweets @IanSinclair.