LONDON — It will take a “Herculean effort” for Labour to reach its key net zero target of clean power by 2030 if it wins power, the U.K. government’s chief climate adviser has said.

Chris Stark, who steps down as chief executive of the Climate Change Committee (CCC) on Friday after six years in charge, told POLITICO the opposition party's clean power goal is achievable — but it will need to “throw everything at it” if elected.

Labour has pledged to clean up the power system by ensuring electricity production in Britain no longer contributes to greenhouse gas emissions by the end of this decade. Labour Leader Keir Starmer — on course for No.10 Downing Street on current polling — is sticking by the commitment, even as the party has watered down its more ambitious green spending plans. 

“I'm not going to chip [away at] it yet,” Stark said in an interview Thursday, referring to the 2030 pledge. “I think it could be done … It would take [a] Herculean effort to do it, and I think you're going to see Labour try and define it more accurately as well.”

Green policy experts and industry bosses have cast doubt on the feasibility of the pledge, given the need to rapidly expand Britain’s creaking electricity grid, reform planning laws, and get more renewable energy sources online.

“I personally don’t think it’s achievable,” Chris Skidmore, a former energy minister in Theresa May's Conservative government, told POLITICO in October. Even the CCC’s former chair John Gummer said he was “yet to see the evidence” Labour's target is reachable. 

“I think it could be done … It would take [a] Herculean effort to do it, and I think you're going to see Labour try and define it more accurately as well.” said Chris Stark.

But Stark was more upbeat than both on whether the target could be met.“‘How do you do it is a really interesting question,” he said, adding: “The Conservative government has also committed to do it by 2035 — so either 2035 or 2030 is still the same strategy.” 

Hitting either target is “definitely credible,” Stark said, but will be a challenge for any government. “It’s bloody hard, right? I mean, let’s be clear on this is, whether it’s 2030 or 2035, this is a big stretch target.”

'Throw everything at it'

One route to hitting the goal, Stark said, is for policymakers to focus more on speeding up the decarbonization of the U.K.’s fleet of gas-fired power stations, which are used to prop up renewables when the wind doesn’t blow. This can be done through technologies like carbon capture, the process of taking harmful carbon emissions and storing them underground.

“In those places, you can generate electricity without causing carbon emissions,” Stark said. “Could you do that quickly over the course of a parliament? Yeah, you could. But you’d have to throw everything at it. And that would be exciting.”

Labour’s lofty target “could well concentrate minds,” he added. 

Stark was speaking on the same day that Scottish National Party First Minister Humza Yousaf collapsed the SNP’s governing coalition with the Scottish Greens, after backlash following Holyrood’s decision to scrap Scotland’s own climate targets. 

Stark said he was “shocked” by Yousaf’s decision to pull the plug on the coalition, but said he takes “some ownership” of the situation, since the announcement on climate targets came after the CCC warned Scotland’s plan to cut carbon emissions by 75 percent by 2030 was no longer credible.

Stark said: “It’s quite a thing to see this stuff, and I suppose this is a reminder of how important climate policy can be.”