Government’s climate plan ruled unlawful by High Court
The government’s plan to meet climate targets and green the economy has been ruled unlawful by the High Court.
The campaigning groups that brought the case had argued it relied too much on risky technologies and glossed over the risk of missing targets.
Judge Clive Sheldon upheld four out of the five grounds in the legal challenge.
The government hard argued it had met all of its three previous “carbon budget” targets to cut emissions and was on track to meet future targets – though other assessments warned otherwise.
This is the second time the three groups – Friends of the Earth, ClientEarth and the Good Law Project – have taken the government to court over its climate plans.
In July 2022 the High Court ruled in their favour that the government’s last climate plan – the Net Zero Strategy – was unlawful because it didn’t explain how targets would be met.
That case forced officials to draw up a second version – the Carbon Budget Delivery Plan (CBDP) – which campaigners argued was still “a complete pipe dream”, and so launched a second legal challenge.
It concerns took the carbon budgets set by the government last year in order to meet Britain’s target of net zero by 2050.
It was published in March 2023, before the government began to tinker with some climate targets, saying it was taking a more “pragmatic” approach.
The campaigners said the second plan relied too much on “unproven” technologies like those that capture carbon dioxide from factories or power plants and store them underground, known as CCS.
While some CCS projects exist, and scientists believe they are crucial in combatting climate change, they have proven hard to scale up and remain very expensive.
The three groups said it was unlawful also because then energy minister Grant Shapps was not told of the risk that policies to reduce emissions could not be delivered.
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