George Osborne ‘has undermined UK role in climate talks’

Britain will enter the Paris climate change talks this week with its credentials as a responsible, low-emission power generator in tatters. That is the stark conclusion of one of the country’s leading energy experts, Professor Stuart Haszeldine of Edinburgh University.

Haszeldine believes George Osborne’s last-minute decision to axe the government’s £1bn support for a scheme to capture and bury carbon dioxide emissions from power stations was a final act that utterly undermined British negotiators’ status in Paris.

The news of the carbon storage cutback, released after the chancellor’s autumn statement last week, arrived in the wake of other major cuts over the past year in renewable energy programmes, including solar power, wind energy and home insulation projects.

Several companies, including Royal Dutch Shell and South of Scotland Electricity, had invested more than £100m developing technology for use at two carbon-storage projects in Scotland and Yorkshire. Carbon dioxide was going to be extracted from power station emissions, liquefied and pumped into underground chambers – until the government halted funding for the project. Haszeldine described the decision as “a betrayal” that desperately weakened the influence of the UK as a nation that was serious about halting climate change.

“Among the lessons from this disastrous reputation failure, and time-wasting and money-wasting failure, must be that energy policy and infrastructure delivery is too important to be left to short-term politicians,” said Haszeldine, a geologist and an expert on carbon storage.

Britain is considered well placed to develop carbon storage. It has considerable engineering expertise, while its depleted North Sea oilfields could act as perfect storage sites for carbon dioxide extracted from power station emissions. The fact that Britain has abandoned this approach only days before negotiators from 190 countries arrive in Paris to discuss climate change is all the more striking and was probably made to find money to avoid making cuts in tax credits, for police funding and for Syrian bombing, said Haszeldine. “It certainly shows where the government’s priorities lie.”

These views will be echoed by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn on Sunday when he accuses the Tory government of refusing to take a lead in moving the world away from its growing fossil fuel consumption.

The Labour leader will speak at the London climate march, one of dozens being held around the world to pressure politicians to reach a deal in Paris. “There are no more hugs for the husky, instead it’s a passionate embrace for the carbon polluters,” he will say, referring to the image of David Cameron posing with a sled dog on a trip to the Arctic in 2006. At the time Cameron pledged a future Tory government would be Britain’s greenest. Since then, his governments have destroyed “the solar industry, removed vital safeguards to reduce the risks of fracking, cancelled support for carbon capture and storage, and cut support for wind turbines,” Corbyn will say.

In another climate protest in London, activists on Saturday night occupied part of Tate Britain gallery where they started to tattoo each other in protest over the gallery’s acceptance of sponsorship from BP. The Tate said it had closed the 1840s gallery where 35 activists had set themselves up.

Alice Bell, a spokesperson for Liberate Tate, the group that is leading the protest, said they were making “a statement about the stain that oil has across society, on the Tate, on the negotiations and across our culture, society and economics more broadly.”