WITH oil and petrol prices soaring, the war in the Middle East has inadvertently made Philip New’s message easier – the sooner we wean ourselves off fossil fuels, the less susceptible we will be to the vagaries of geopolitics.
And let’s not forget the often-contradictory decisions of the mercurial Donald J Trump.
While you have certainly heard of the peace-prize-winning president, you might not have heard of Mr New – a former BP executive who helped pivot the global firm away from carbon when it went Beyond Petroleum.
But Mr New has also helped to pen arguably one of the most important and far-reaching documents facing the new Assembly and the existing and would-be politicians who strive to be ministers.
As chair of the Jersey Climate Council, he and four other individuals with diverse expertise have recently assessed Jersey’s progress on its journey to carbon neutrality.
In 2022, the past Assembly passed the Carbon Neutral Roadmap – that plots a potential path to net zero by 2050, which Jersey is committed to achieve.
Four years on, Mr New and his team have marked the government’s homework – not only assessing progress but also making recommendations on how we can best reduce emissions, which in Jersey primarily come from transport.
It its findings, the council were clear: a net-zero Jersey is not only better for the environment but also for its own security and economy. It was also clear that doing nothing – kicking the can down the road – would only mean Jersey having to pay more for its energy, it being more exposed, and it losing important opportunities.
Mr New said: “Back in 2022, the Roadmap set out ten reasons why Jersey should act – and nothing much has changed since then.
“If anything, the evidence that climate change is happening and having some nasty consequences is growing. What has changed, of course, is the geopolitical mood music, particularly following the election of Donald Trump.
“What we are seeing play out is the consequences of a dependence on fossil fuels, and the geopolitical uncertainty that we are still living in.
“The core arguments still seem to me as valid as ever. For anyone who says: ‘Oh, the changing geopolitics mean that we don’t need to act as prominently or urgently’, I would counter by saying geopolitics have acted to expose the consequences of our dependence on fossil fuels, and if we carry on in this way, then the risk is that it just gets worse.
“Anyone who has an electric boiler or an electric car today is much more sheltered from the consequences of the Straits of Hormuz closing than people who are still driving petrol diesel cars and burning fuel oil or gas.”
The Climate Council’s report, published recently, was not just an audit of work so far but an opportunity to suggest further actions. The council concedes that is early doors – considering the roadmap was only passed four years ago – and most of the data it could assess was from 2025 at best, and sometimes 2024.
It also recognised that policy makers had had to “make bricks without straw” in the sense that the Roadmap’s means of funding – a Climate Emergency Fund which was initially £5m and then topped up with transport-related duty and charges – was not enough on its own to pay for the transition.
Mr New said: “It has been relatively under resourced, and one of the consequences is that there is still a lot of uncertainty, and where steps have been taken, they have been a bit stop-start.
“For example, policies to support electric cars were introduced and then withdrawn once the money was used up. So, there is nothing that anyone could hang their hat onto as a clear, long-term piece of policy that a business could plan around.”
But Mr New said that, despite the stops and starts, Jersey was still in a good position compared to other places, including the UK.
He said: “The Island already has a high quality, secure, low carbon electricity supply, which, importantly, is less exposed to natural gas markets than even green electricity prices are in the UK.
“There have also been some things done in the past which are quite impressive – and the standout thing there would be the decision taken by Andium Homes to electrify space heating for its social housing estate.
“Also, the strong engagement, particularly at the beginning of the Roadmap, along with the framework and the ambition, were state-of-the-art.”
However, Mr New added that there was a ‘but’ – emissions have not really come down, energy use has changed at the margin, and there has been only a material reduction in gas use by 8%, while electricity use has only crept up a bit.
That means that on the current trajectory, the Roadmap’s interim goals – which revolves around Jersey reducing emissions by 68% by 2030 – will not be met, the council concluded.
Mr New said: “The way I would characterise the downside of Jersey’s happy starting point is now its journey to net zero is dominated by ‘the hard yards’ of the transition.
“You have access to clean energy; what you have to do is change behaviours and change kit so that more people in Jersey can access that clean, secure, renewable energy.
“That is challenging because that really comes down to, in essence, two things: changing the cars we drive, and how we how we drive; and what we do about heating our homes. They are both at the more difficult end of energy transitions, but Jersey has an advantage in that it doesn’t have to clean up its grid first.”
Mr New added that another important challenge faced Jersey in addition to ‘cars’ and ‘heating’. And that was ‘waste’.
He said: “There is uncertainty about the actual emissions that come from the energy from waste plant at La Collette [the ‘incinerator’].
“Based on the work done by [emissions auditors] Aether, we were really struck by the size of the contribution to overall Jersey emissions that comes from the relatively insignificant amount of electricity that is generated at La Collette
“This was a 2030 priority in the Roadmap but we would advocate that this could start to yield benefit earlier, and so prioritising actions to bring Jersey waste management programmes and recycling standards to 21st century standards would be useful.
“Thinking that you can chuck anything away and it will be burnt to make electricity is a misunderstanding. Step One is make sure that you are only burning the stuff that you have to burn, and do much more on supporting and enabling recycling, which, at the moment, feels patchy at best in Jersey.
“Then absolutely prioritise what happens as a replacement for the La Collette system. It could be that carbon capture and storage is part of the solution, or it could be that other things start to emerge as ways of dealing with the emissions that come from getting rid of the waste there.”
Listing some of the other recommendations of the council, Mr New said: “Above all, whatever Jersey decides, it needs to make sure that it is long lasting, it has proper commitments attached to it and it measures outputs; not inputs.
“If I was to be critical of the first phase of the Roadmap, it is that people gave themselves good scores for having, for example, spent the money. But what we should really be looking at is whether that has changed the emissions.
“The government needs to make clear, long-term budgetary commitments alongside the targets. Part of the problem is that the targets didn’t change, but the budgets did. They have to be hand in glove.
“Ministers also need to give clear signals, particularly around the phasing out of fossil fuel infrastructure.”
However, that very point has been thrown into doubt recently by Environment Minister Steve Luce, who said he was dropping the Roadmap’s target of banning the importation of new and used petrol and diesel cars by 2030.
Instead, he said, Jersey would rely on decisions in the UK, where most vehicles come from anyway. If fossil fuel cars were banned there, then it would effectively mean a ban here too, he argued.
Mr New and the council were not impressed.
He said: “Our view is that the original intent was appropriate, and this decision therefore must be seen as a disappointment. The fear is that Jersey becomes a graveyard for the UK’s used petrol and diesel cars.
“It is a shame for other reasons: Jersey is a perfect place to have an electric car because range anxiety is not an issue. Also, prices of electric vehicles continue to tumble.”
Happy to move on from this more political subject to a broader critique, Mr New said that Jersey needed to more fully embrace the ‘polluter pays’ principle, as long as there was clear support for those at the lower end of the income scale.
He said: “If you just have a universal subsidy for buying a new electric vehicle or getting an electric heating system, then often it will be those that can afford it the most who will take advantage of that support.
“The council advocates Jersey taking on a broader mix of incentives, putting out clearer price signals, either by having mandates or changing duty rates, but then being clear about providing support to those that need it most.
“An example could be fossil heating oil attracting some kind of price premium – in effect, a tax – which would potentially price in alternatives, such as electrification or lower carbon heating oil, but then those who would be most negatively impacted and who could least afford the extra cost would receive targeted support.”
Other practical steps would be encouraging Jersey Electricity to invest in charging infrastructure ahead of need, and not wait for the demand to be there, and more cycle and bus lanes, he said.
Mr New was well qualified to lead the Jersey Climate Council – a body proposed by a Scrutiny amendment whose work has now finished. For the first half of his career, he was an oil and gas executive with BP, before leading the global giant’s alternative energy businesses.
He left BP in 2014 and became chief executive of something called the Energy Systems Catapult, which looked at the UK energy system to ensure it was prepared for net-zero. Since 2022, he has worked with the UK Government to produce reports around sustainable aviation fuels and electric vehicle charging and has sat on various boards. The other members of the council came from different walks of life, including finance, utilities, business investment, academia and meteorology. One thing that did unify them, however, was a conviction that climate change is real and humanity needs to act.
Their message to Jersey is clear: The Island needs to divert more [clean] energy to its net zero efforts.
Mr New said: “The strategic framing and the long-term aspirations of the Roadmap remain utterly viable and valid. Many of the short-term enabling steps were executed but the heavy lifting has been very patchy so far, and so it probably needs a reset.
“My message to the next Assembly is to please read our report and hopefully it will help inform that necessary reset.”
