GOING FOR
Industry leaders and MPs turned out in force for Ecobuild, the largest eco show on earth, to thrash out how the UK can meet its carbon reduction targets. Alex Smith and Carina Bailey report
‘W
e don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell’ of hitting the UK’s carbon reduction target by 2050, David Strong
told a packed Ecobuild session last month. The chairman of the Energy Effi ciency
Partnership for Buildings questioned the coalition’s self-styled ‘greenest government ever’ label, following a number of policy U-turns. This included the Feed-in-Tariffs ‘fi asco’, which he described as ‘fundamentally fl awed’ because consequential improvements were not introduced alongside them. He also cited the government’s refusal
to introduce industry’s recommendations on display energy certifi cates (DECs) and the failure to publish the revised Building Regulations for Part L as evidence, in his view, that the government is not interested in being green. He added: ‘The Treasury is philosophically absolutely opposed to this and seems to be entirely immune to any evidence that a green economy creates jobs and growth.’ This accusation of a lack of enthusiasm and
support for a green economy, levelled at the Chancellor George Osborne, was frequently repeated by speakers throughout the three-day event, staged at the Excel Centre in London. But Lord Deben (formerly John Gummer), chairman of the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), told delegates that the Climate Change Act was ‘entrenched’ in the British Constitution by law and the only way to avoid the 2050 target was to repeal the Act itself. He added: ‘In order to reach our 2050 targets we may have to tighten what we’re
22 CIBSE Journal April 2013
doing – or loosen it. But we won’t know for several months to come.’ Explaining why people doubt the objective,
he said: ‘Everyone is in favour of everything in general, and not keen on it in particular.’ Paul King, chief executive of the UK Green
Building Council (UK-GBC), said the UK would achieve its 2050 target, but it would take a ‘revolutionary change on the back of a technological breakthrough’ to get there. But, according to David Reiner, senior
lecturer at the University of Cambridge, the biggest hurdle will be persuading British voters on why such disproportionate steps to cut the UK’s carbon have to be taken when, ultimately, China will be the world’s dominant emitter.
The route of all knowledge During the conference, the Low Carbon Routemap for the Built Environment was launched by Paul Morrell, chairman of the Route Map Working Group at the Green Construction Board. The route map, developed by Arup, has
three routes to zero carbon and assumes that the electricity grid will be green – a dangerous assumption, according to Morrell: ‘If it isn’t green, we have probably set off the biggest time bomb in history.’ He added: ‘I don’t think it’s the end of the
road for zero carbon, I think it’s the beginning of a new road,’ but he warned it would be a hugely complex journey. The route map sets out what is required
from the construction industry to achieve an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2050. Morrell said: ‘We
Bordass (right) tells Foster to ‘focus on in-use performance, not virtual carbon’
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