Sharma: The government should explain how oil and gas are net zero

Mr. Sharma spoke to deputies representing a number of parliamentary committees ahead of the latest UN climate summit, Policeman 27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, minutes after it was announced that he was no longer a minister Office after the new one prime minister Rearrangement by Risha Sunak.

Rejecting government policies that have sparked angry backlash from environmental campaigns, including the lifting of a fracking ban and 100 new offshore oil and gas licences, he said he did not support fracking.

And he pointed to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) warning that there can be no further fossil fuel projects if the world is to meet its goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the most dangerous impacts of climate change. climate will be felt.

“In terms of new oil and gas licences, I think the UK government, indeed every government, needs to demonstrate how the policies we are proposing meet the legally binding commitment to achieve, in our case, net zero. to 2050, or even our nearest carbon budget,” he said.

He added: “There is a huge onus on the government to explain and demonstrate how any of these policies actually meet legally binding obligations.”

Mr Sharma, who chaired the Cop26 summit in Glasgow and will negotiate on behalf of the UK at Cop27, also told MPs that the world was making climate progress with the deployment of renewable energy and electric cars, but it was frankly not fast enough.

He said the IEA had published a report suggesting that global emissions would increase by less than 1%, much less than last year, due to “the very rapid deployment of renewable energy and electric vehicles around the world”.

“So progress is there, technology is rolling out, but frankly, not fast enough,” he said.

The number of coal projects has fallen significantly, coal financing has been much harder to secure, and renewables will account for 90% of new additions in 2021, as countries accelerate renewables following Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.

“I think as a result of that, we’re going to see the pace of renewable energy and installations accelerate faster than it would otherwise.”

He also suggested that the “disappointing” pushback from countries at the last G20 meeting, including the “incomprehensibly” start to doubt climate science, had begun to abate at the UN General Assembly.

In the UK, he said the government had a firm commitment and Mr Sunak had pledged to insulate millions of homes, but he said the government needed to deliver on its net zero strategy and speed up the process of insulating homes.