The decline in UK's carbon emissions is set to accelerate after 2020 as power generation, helped by a rising floor price of carbon on fossil fuel inputs, makes good progress towards de-carbonisation

Our forecast explained - On our latest projections to 2025:

• because of the increase in emissions in 2010, driven by increases in emissions from households, industry, and power generation, the previous government’s long-standing carbon reduction policy goal - a 20% reduction in CO2 emissions between 1990 and 2010 - has been decisively missed despite the sharp reduction in emissions in 2009 due to the recession. This salutary lesson on the policy difficulty of making a reality out of rhetoric should be heeded by the Coalition as it strives to be the ‘greenest government ever’
  
• the decline in the UK’s carbon emissions is expected to accelerate from around -½-1% pa over 2010-20 to around -1¼% pa thereafter to 2025 as power generation makes considerable progress towards de-carbonisation helped by the introduction of a rising floor price of carbon on fossil fuel inputs to power generation based on the policy announced in Budget 2011
  …but the government will need to put in place effective policies to achieve its renewable generation targets or to reduce energy demand if it is to make good progress towards meeting its longer-term goal of a low-carbon economy
  
• on existing policies, including those inherited, endorsed and shortly to be put into effect by the Coalition government, the UK is set to miss the carbon budget targets narrowly in the first two budget periods (2008-12 and 2013-17), but by a wider margin in the third (2018-22) and especially the fourth (2023-27)

See full Press Release.