Geo-engineering and the Environment

Douglas McAllister Excerpts

Monday 23rd June 2025 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero (Kerry McCarthy)]

It is a pleasure, as always, to see you in the Chair, Ms Furniss. I congratulate the hon. Member for South Cotswolds (Dr Savage) on leading the debate and on showing respect for the notion behind the petition, because that is not always the case when people come and present views. I hope the petitioners feel that she has done justice to their stance.

I will set out what we are doing to tackle the issues highlighted in the petition. A lot of the concerns that have been raised today and over the last few weeks have been driven by recent research proposals to explore climate cooling technologies, as well as the media coverage that that has caused, and I will come on to those concerns in a moment.

Geo-engineering is a term commonly used to refer to two groups of technologies, as has been mentioned: greenhouse gas removals and solar radiation modification. Those are two very separate, very different approaches to addressing climate change, and the UK has two very separate, very different positions on their use. Greenhouse gas removals actively remove greenhouse gases—predominantly carbon dioxide—from the atmosphere for highly durable storage, resulting in negative emissions. They are vital to achieving net zero, and we support their deployment. Solar radiation modification, on the other hand, describes a set of interventions that aim to cool the earth, largely by reflecting some of the sun’s energy back into space.

[Douglas McAllister (West Dunbartonshire) (Lab)]

I receive regular communication from constituents asking me for my opinion on the UK’s involvement in chemtrails and geo-engineering. Will the Minister reassure us that chemtrails are actually condensation trails and nothing to do with solar radiation management, and that the UK Government have not deployed SRM techniques and have no plans to do so?

[Kerry McCarthy]

I can certainly reassure my hon. Friend. I have received quite a lot of correspondence on that, which MPs have passed on from their constituents. I have answered written questions—which are in the public domain—and replied to queries on both those points. I will try to express as clearly and vehemently as I can that we have no plans for SRM.

On the supposed chemtrails issue, that is a term used by some people who claim that the white trails seen behind high-altitude aircraft on clear days contain undisclosed chemical agents intended for a covert atmospheric spraying programme. They are, in fact, as my hon. Friend said, contrails, which form when warm, moist aircraft exhaust fumes mix with cold air at altitude. Under certain atmospheric conditions, contrails can persist and spread out to form cirrus-like clouds before disappearing. There is no deliberate spraying of chemicals in the skies over the UK for climate modification. We are not in favour of SRM and have no plans to change that position; I will say more on that in a moment, but first I want to add a little more on greenhouse gas removals.

Making Britain a clean energy superpower is one of the five missions of this Government, delivering clean power by 2030 and accelerating progress towards net zero across the economy by 2050. I note the comments from the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Pippa Heylings) about the UK being off track to do that. We will be publishing our carbon budget delivery plan by October; as she said, the previous Government were taken to court for failing to produce adequate policies to match the ambition. Obviously, there is no point in setting targets unless they can be delivered. We will set out our plan in due course, and then talk about the seventh carbon budget and meeting our nationally determined contributions.

We must do everything we can to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—that is our starting point. We need that effort to be shared across all Government Departments, and we need everyone to play a role.