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Prime Minister Boris Johnson says he wants to make a “big bet” on renewables – turning the UK into the “Saudi Arabia” of wind power.
Speaking via video link to a climate roundtable discussion at the UN in New York, Mr Johnson said the country held “extraordinary potential for wind”.
He said the UK should embrace a range of new technologies to achieve its goal of net zero emissions by 2050.
The UK holds the presidency of the UN climate conference, known as the COP.
But because of the coronavirus crisis, the annual conference will not take place this year. It has instead been postponed until November 2021.
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He said the UK had an ambitious agenda for the meeting and called on other countries to be “similarly ambitious”. He praised the recent pledge by China to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060.
Mr Johnson reiterated the government’s pledge to “build back greener” after the Covid-19 pandemic, through a green industrial revolution. He pledged to deliver thousands of new jobs in the process.
On the question of new technologies, the Prime Minister also said he wanted the UK to take the lead in carbon capture and storage technology (CCS), in which greenhouse emissions are captured from sources such as power stations and stored underground.
He said the country would also be investing in renewable hydrogen fuel technology for vehicles, as well as accelerate the uptake of electric cars.
Mr Johnson said the UK’s greenhouse gases were 8-10% down in 2020 on previous years. But added: “The bad news is we’ve achieved that by sustaining an appalling economic shock in the form of coronavirus.
“The only way we’ve done – or we’re going to do it – is as you can imagine because our planes aren’t flying, our people aren’t moving, our cars aren’t travelling and our industry isn’t producing emissions in the way that it normally would.”
At the roundtable, Ursula Van der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said that keeping global temperature rise under 1.5C – considered the gateway to dangerous global warming – was still possible “if we act quickly and if we act together”.
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