The Seventh Carbon Budget: The scientists have done their job; now it’s over to the advocates
By Barry Johnston, Co-Founder Purpose Union
The UK Committee on Climate Change (CCC) has released its seventh carbon budget. The document is the latest in a 5-year cycle of reports that guides the government in reaching its target to decarbonise the UK economy by 2050.
This advice lands in a political climate unimaginable a year ago, not to mind 2020 when the last iteration of the advice was published. Back then a Tory Prime Minister had just introduced legislation to make the UK’s net zero targets legally binding. Now the party is led by a self-professed “net zero skeptic” while a Labour prime minister is rolling out airline runways and picking fights with environmentalists.
As if to hammer home the point, on the same day the CCC was setting out its plans, BP bowed to an activist investor campaign and abandoned any remaining pretence that it cared about the climate. In 2020 its executives thought the smart commercial opportunity lay in pivoting to renewables.
Into these headwinds the climate wonks at the CCC dropped their 400 page tome. If you haven’t gotten round to reading it yet, we’ve saved you the trouble. Below we share seven key takeaways from the report as well as analysing what this means for maintaining public support for climate action in the near and longer term.
The UK is actually quite good at this
At a time when the institutions of the UK and its reputation as a major global player are under question, its net zero efforts are one area where it can genuinely claim to be “world leading”. The institutional framework set out in the Climate Change Act - the first of its kind globally - has set the benchmark for an orderly energy transition. The UK is the fastest decarbonising major economy, halving its emissions since 1990 and meeting all three of its carbon budgets to date (up to end 2022). And it has done this without the rolling blackouts and state-mandated veganism that its opponents warned of. What’s more, according to those eco zealots at the CBI, the UK green economy is booming, growing three times faster than the rest of the economy, creating a million jobs paying above the average wage. The CCC has done an excellent, if academic, job in setting out a net zero good news story. The government - and climate campaigners - must do a better job in telling that story too.
Here comes the hard part
So far so good, but there’s no time to rest on laurels. The most striking graph in the report shows the distribution in emissions reductions by sector across different carbon budget periods. The graphs for emissions reductions to date look very different to those in the future. Over half of emissions up to 2022 were due to changing energy supply, mostly driven by the phase-out of coal and increase in renewables. Instead the charts for the coming period show much bigger reductions required in transport, buildings and eventually agriculture. For the former two the plan is to go big on electrification - that’s EVs and heat pumps.
Figure 2 (Distribution of emissions reductions …) from The Seventh Carbon Budget
And this really is the crux of the issue. We’re entering into a new phase in the energy transition where the changes required won’t happen in far away power plants but in people’s everyday lives. Opponents of net zero have been far quicker to latch onto this reality, and have used it to try to spread misinformation and opposition to climate action.
The CCC, to its credit, has tackled this head on by engaging a panel of citizens in a thoughtful conversation about the priorities, trade offs and opportunities that net zero presents for the wider public. This evidence from this part of the report backs up what we have observed in our own work on climate narratives, that given the right context and when couched in terms of fairness the public instinctively understands the logic of a just transition - even if they would never call it that.
Perhaps most critically, we must reclaim the language of freedom and choice from net zero opponents. The CCC's citizens' panel revealed that people want support, not mandates – they want trustworthy information, help with upfront costs, and protection for those with limited options. The comparison of EV and heat pump rollout to previous tech upgrades such as refrigerators, mobile phones and internet, is an astute one. It reframes the change from a new and unwelcome burden, instead positioning it as just one more familiar upgrade as has been experienced before, to their enormous advantage.
Elsewhere, the CCC pulls its punches on thorny issues of demand reduction for meat, dairy and aviation. This has disappointed some campaigners. The advice does however indicate a clear direction of travel required in these sectors but backs away from prescriptive measures that have appeared in its work before - such as flight caps. It’s likely this was a political judgement rather than a technical one, showing the committee itself is not impervious to the prevailing political winds. Perhaps some conversations need to wait until the eighth carbon budget.
Seven Key Takeaways from the Seventh Carbon Budget:
The recommended Seventh Carbon Budget (2038-2042) is 535 MtCO2e, including international aviation and shipping emissions, representing an 87% reduction from 1990 levels by the middle of the budget period.
Electrification is the largest source of emissions reductions, accounting for 60% of reductions by 2040, requiring a doubling of electricity generation and six-fold increase in offshore wind capacity.
By 2040, the plan envisions three-quarters of cars being electric, half of UK homes heated by heat pumps, and electricity meeting 61% of industrial energy demand.
Demand-side measures are acknowledged as a necessary complement to technological changes, including improved efficiency across sectors, shifts toward lower-carbon transportation choices like public transit and walking, and moderate dietary changes with reduced meat and dairy consumption.
The transition will require upfront investment but is projected to become cost-saving during the Seventh Carbon Budget period, with reduced energy waste and lower operating costs for electric vehicles and heat pumps.
Nature-based solutions are integral to the plan, including increasing UK woodland coverage from 13% to 16% by 2040 and restoring peatlands from 26% to 55% in natural or rewetted conditions.
Low-carbon fuels and carbon capture and storage (CCS) will play targeted roles in harder-to-decarbonize sectors like aviation, shipping, and certain industrial processes where electrification is challenging.
Opponents of climate action want to paint advocates as out-of-touch elites imposing unnecessary hardship. But the seventh carbon budget reveals a different story: a practical pathway with economic benefits, health improvements, and enhanced energy security. Climate advocates must now pivot from technical arguments to human-centered narratives that directly confront and dismantle the opposition's manufactured outrage.
The scientists have done their job. Now it's up to advocates to win the public battle by reframing the conversation around tangible benefits rather than abstract sacrifices. The UK has already proven it can lead on climate while growing its economy. The next phase requires bringing people along by ensuring the transition works for everyone – not just technically, but practically and fairly in their everyday lives.
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