The Iraq War was a war of choice. Iraq posed no immediate nor distant threat to the UK or British interests.

The often aggressive and unpleasant regime of Saddam Hussein had been successfully contained by a coalition of allies during the 1990s.

And for ordinary Iraqis – not seeking to engage in politics – life was a little worse than it had been (due to sanctions) but it was stable and ‘OK’.

The decision of the UK to get involved in the Iraq war was controversial at the time, and over a million marched in London against it.

It was controversial because there was very little in it for the UK, controversial because the justifications for the war quickly unravelled and controversial because British military personnel began to die in a war that was not widely supported by the electorate.

It also provides a relearning of a timeless lesson of war: that conflict is contagious and often uncontainable. All western powers – whether they were involved in the war or not – are still struggling to contain the contagious impact of Iraq.

Islamic extremism a direct product of the Iraq war

The Iraq war continues to scar us today, and none more so than the rise and rise of Islamic extremism. This forms the second lesson from the Iraq war: the end of reasonableness and the rise of extremism.

We like to say that no-one could have predicted the rise of Islamic State, but this brand of extremism has its origins in the political vacuum left in Iraq and the activities of al-Zarqawi who was able to mobilise support against what he described as the occupying coalition powers.

What could not be predicted – perhaps – is the amount of traction these initially very marginal groupings would attract in terms of funding from certain Middle Eastern states, the support they would attract from western youths transiting between the Middle East and Europe who have picked up ways of thinking and military ways of operating that have made them such a threat on the European mainland.

In the response to this growing threat, we have seen western intelligence and security agencies engaging in morally and ethically dubious practices (such as torture and kidnapping / rendition) and dragnet surveillance of entire populations.

Security elites have met the unflinching unreasonableness of jihadists with their own technocratic unreasonableness, some of which has alienated citizens from their governments but all of which has changed the relationship between citizens and their governments.

The refugee blowback has holed the EU below the waterline

The Iraq war – so controversial amongst European Union member states – has come back to fatally undermine the EU. The third lesson from Iraq is ‘blowback’, the term-coined by the CIA to describe the consequences of military actions.

The radical Islamist groups unleashed by the Iraq war have unsubtlly undermined the European project via insurgent military attacks in London, Madrid, Paris, and Brussels. Those same groups have attracted large numbers of European youths (some estimated 5,000) into the conflicts in Iraq and Syria, which in turn has forced thousands to flee these conflict zones and head for the relative safety of Europe.

Fear of people from alien cultures traumatised by the experience of war has spooked an ever growing number of European citizens, who have turned to populist politicians with readily accessible answers to this ‘problem’.

The political mainstream have failed to respond adequately: initially because they thought it was beneath them, and latterly because it is a problem that requires sophisticated responses over a stretched time frame. The blowback from Iraq is the death of the European project.

Who trusts ‘experts’ now?

The recent Brexit vote provides the fourth lesson: the death of expertise. The Blair government’s use and abuse of intelligence product has undermined the public’s confidence in expert advice. No longer can the government trot out experts to validate its case.

The trashing of dozens of eminent economists, trade experts, scientists, lawyers, academics by the Leave campaign has its origins in the Blair government’s packaging of the Iraq intelligence picture. The public were told to trust intelligence analysts and to do so on faith – not only were these analysts deeply expert, they also had access to information beyond the reach of the public and even most parliamentarians.

It was not the analysis that turned out to be false, but the packaging, but the damage had been done: expertise was no longer to be trusted. Such a change in culture allowed the Leave campaign to undermine the evidence based analysis brought into support the remain side and strongly contributed to the shock decision to Brexit.

It has also seen the end of Blair’s social democratic vision of ‘third way politics’, not just in the UK but across large swathes of the EU: insurgent parties are on the march. It is difficult to see how the political establishment who dominated at the time of the decision to go to war with Iraq re-establishes the trust it needs with the public.

The vital message the Chilcot report will withhold

So, the Chilcot report is likely to criticise Tony Blair and his government. It is likely to say he committed the UK to war earlier than he likes to admit and on a hunch that he could contain the wilder excesses of the Bush Administration.

It is likely to say that defence planners estimated that it would take at least 15 years to return Iraq to stability, and that this has proved to be a conservative estimate, not the wild over-estimate that politicians suggested at the time.

Chilcot is likely to say that intelligence officials warned Blair that the jihadists would bring their war to the streets of the UK and that Blair’s judgement was that he should seek to meet them on his terms, aggressively and early.

The Chilcot Inquiry will tell us a lot of what we already know. But it will not tell us that the Iraq war sowed the seeds for the collapse of the European project, for fundamental changes in our political culture and the creation of a world in which it is becoming less safe for Europeans to travel.

But it is these impacts which we are currently feeling today, and are more deserving of our collective attention.

Dr Robert Dover is Senior Lecturer in Intelligence and International Security at the University of Leicester. He is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Intelligence History, and SageOpen. He, with Michael Goodman and Richard Aldrich, form the editorial board for the Hurst series on Intelligence and Security.

This article was originally published by Think: Leicester.

A major new climate policy was announced by the UK government on June 30, almost unnoticed in the Brexit aftermath.

The media’s focus on Westminster backstabbing meant the country’s latest ‘carbon budget’, widely heralded as unambiguously good news for the environment, hasn’t had the scrutiny it deserves.

The Fifth Carbon Budget effectively commits the UK to reducing emissions by 57% from 1990 levels by sometime between 2028 and 2032.

These budgets serve as five-year ‘stepping stones’ towards achieving an 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2050 – the ultimate aim of the 2008 Climate Change Act. Budgets are determined years in advance to enable the required policy planning.

A 57% cut sounds great doesn’t it? The problem is that the Paris climate agreement, negotiated at COP21 last December, hugely increased levels of ambition. This budget no longer ensures the UK is doing its fair share globally to prevent dangerous climate change.

‘Fair shares’ under a more ambitious Paris agreement

To recap: in December 2015, 174 states and the EU signed an international agreement aiming to limit global temperature rises to “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels”. It also called for intensified efforts to limit rises at 1.5C, acknowledging that this would considerably reduce the risk of dangerous climate change.

But the UK government sets its carbon budgets in consultation with the advisory Committee on Climate Change (CCC), which aims only for a 50% probability of achieving a 2C limit.

Hence, if every country followed the UK’s lead there is already an ‘about as likely as not’ chance of a 2C future. The increased ambition of the Paris agreement, in this sense, compels the UK government to revise its budgets and aim for more stringent targets.

The basic science behind carbon budgets is this: for every tonne of carbon emitted into the atmosphere, mostly thanks to fossil fuels, there is an equivalent rise in temperature. The IPCC estimates that we have already emitted 65% of the carbon that is likely to result in a 2C rise. Lots of fossil fuels remain in the ground, and the more we burn, the more the world will warm.

To keep warming below 2C we need to ensure that our global emissions of carbon remain below a certain level, or ‘budget’.

There’s no internationally-agreed approach to sharing the available carbon budget. However, many feel the UK should pursue more ambitious targets than most, reflecting its outsized historical responsibility for climate change.

The CCC’s advice is based on the principle of contraction and convergence, whereby the global carbon budget is distributed equally across nations in accordance with every person having an equal right to ‘carbon space’ by 2050. UK emissions per capita would need to reduce, whereas emissions in the least industrialised countries would have room to grow, albeit not even close to current British levels.

If the remaining global budget – one that would give us a 66% probability of staying below 2C – is apportioned on an equal per capita basis determined by today’s population, we calculate the UK’s cumulative carbon budget from 2011 through until 2100 would be in the region of 9 gigatonnes of greenhouse gases. If the intention is to achieve 1.5C, the budget would be significantly less.

However, we estimate current UK carbon budgets will mean nearly 15 gigatonnes of emissions from 2011 onwards – that’s 60% higher than an equal share.

The UK consumes more than it produces

So the UK is set to emit far more than its fair share, even under the latest budget restrictions. Yet on top of this, industrialised countries such as Britain tend to benefit from the way emissions are calculated: carbon budgets focus on the emissions produced, not consumed.

While emissions produced within the UK’s territory – by its factories, power plants, cars and so on – are declining, emissions driven by UK consumption are rising. These consumption-based emissions include all the carbon released when making clothes, phones or cars imported to the UK, while excluding gases emitted in the production of British exports.

As the UK consumes lots, but actually makes relatively little, its emissions are effectively outsourced. A government enquiry four years ago stated that “the UK has to address its consumption if it is to make an effective contribution to a global reduction of greenhouse gas emissions”, but this hasn’t materialised in practice.

Neither the Paris agreement nor the individual national pledges explicitly refer to consumption emissions, while budgets are still attributed to a country’s territory. Yet Paris is too ambitious to be achieved without addressing demand through appropriate consumption-related policies.

A greater emphasis on demand reduction

The UK is already set to fail to meet its Fourth Carbon Budget with the shortfall increasing the fifth time round.

After a £1 billion competition to incentivise carbon capture and storage (CCS) was abandoned, the country’s climate policies now rely largely on an unprecedented boost in wind farms, solar energy and biomass power, and are likely to require extracting carbon directly from the atmosphere using risky and unproven technologies.

While huge wind farms, tidal lagoons and so on are headline-grabbing projects, there needs to be much greater emphasis on the often-overlooked topic of reducing energy demand – it’s immediate, effective and low risk.

There is a danger that climate and energy policy could be caught up in the political turmoil caused by the Brexit vote. Climate experts had already warned a vote to leave the EU would harm existing environmental policies, after all.

The government should not only continue honouring its existing commitments, but also intensify its level of ambition. This would allow the UK to ease worries generated by its exit and keep demonstrating its global leadership in climate change – even in the post-Brexit era.

Kate Scott is Researcher in Climate Mitigation, University of Leeds.

Marco Sakai is Research Fellow in Ecological Economics, University of Leeds.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

To blow your own trumpet can feel very un-British. As a nation, we typically shy away from talking about our accomplishments. We’d rather discuss what isn’t great or what we can do better, than what we excel at. And as a nation that is currently quite divided, it’s important to realise that there’s a lot that makes Britain great, particularly when it comes to renewable energy.

For many years, the UK has been quietly establishing itself as a renewable energy hub and dare I say it one of the world’s leaders in renewable energy development. While much of this activity is out of the public’s line of sight, investment in the UK’s renewable industry today is benefiting the entire population.

The UK is now home to Europe’s largest floating solar park in Walton-on-Thames, as well as the world’s largest offshore wind farm, Thanks to developments such as these, figures from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) show that renewable energy accounted for a record breaking 25.1% of total electricity generation in the UK in the first quarter of 2016,

What’s more, we achieved a significant milestone earlier this year, after the UK briefly powered itself without burning any coal for the first time in more than 100 years.

Meanwhile, investment in renewable energy production is growing. Investment levels in the UK increased by around 25 per cent during 2015, despite the price of fossil fuels falling, according to the REN21 Global Status Report. As such, the UK is now ranked as Europe’s largest renewables investor and the fourth largest in the world, ahead of India and just behind China, the US, and Japan.

Fuelling further growth – how the UK can maintain its green credentials

Despite making great headway, the UK’s position at the forefront of the green revolution is not a certainty. Future growth can be threatened by the outcomes of the recent referendum and policy changes, which are impacting investor confidence. Without a stable regulatory backdrop, investors are less willing to make funding available for renewable energy projects in the UK.

This means that many planned developments may never be realised, while the UK’s 2020 emissions targets and those agreed at COP21 last year could quickly become unachievable.

To give investors the confidence to invest in long-term buy and hold assets, such as wind and solar projects, the government must support a stable environment that will attract institutional investors looking for reliable and long-term returns. But how can the regulatory and policy risks be mitigated?

1. Adopt a long-term approach. Investment cycles extend far beyond the four or five year terms that political parties are typically in power, and there must be a willingness to reconcile these two competing timeframes.

2. We must develop policies informed by international case studies. The stable investment environment in Germany is a good example to follow. The shift to the auction regime for solar has not been without its problems, but capacity deployment continues apace and investors benefit from a high degree of Government support and long-term policy certainty provided through the Energiewende.

 3. Communication, often one of the biggest stumbling blocks, must be improved. Governments can reduce uncertainties through better-communicating the rationale behind decisions – demonstrating they are driven by robust evidence rather than ideology.   

Provided political and regulatory risks are managed, energy infrastructure offers an attractive proposition for private capital. Renewable energy assets are a known quantum – providing long-term inflation-linked investment returns and could provide liability matching assets for pension schemes in particular. Institutional investors such as pension funds could make an enormous contribution to developing the clean energy sector of the future.

With a stable regulatory framework in place, renewable energy can offer attractive returns to institutional investors, as evidenced by three major pension funds in continental Europe recently announcing plans to boost investments in low-carbon industries by more than $31bn (£20bn) by 2020. Further inspiration can be sought from major retailers such as IKEA and Marks & Spencer, which have unveiled ambitious green investment plans.

Not only can renewable energy combat climate change, it has been proven to bring down the wholesale costs of electricity significantly, so it’s unsurprisingly popular with voters, as was shown in the DECC Wave 17 Attitude Tracking survey earlier this year.

The government must listen to the public, and take decisive steps to prevent global warming and encourage greater investment in new renewable energy projects, by establishing a more stable regulatory framework for renewable energy assets both operational and in development. Only then will institutional investors truly appreciate the compelling financial and climate case for investment.

With the official signing of the Paris Agreement, the UK has a responsibility to meet its 2020 emissions targets in what is a global effort to reduce carbon emissions. Here at Low Carbon, we believe that we must achieve a true low-carbon economy, and act now to stop or reverse climate change before the damage is irrevocable. Investment in renewables is indispensable to this process and goes hand-in-hand with the cultural shift that we need to take place, where we reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

A broader, more diverse energy mix in the UK which includes solar and wind, for example, will not only benefit our environment but will also enhance the sustainability of our energy industry as a whole, making sure we don’t trail behind other countries in Europe and globally who already have this as a priority. In generating a quarter of the UK’s electricity supply, it is clear that renewable energy is a core, resilient electricity source that is here to stay, and we need to shout about this from the rooftops.