Jeremy Hunt’s budget to announce £20bn funding to cut carbon emissions

theguardian.com:

The chancellor is poised to announce a £20bn investment in technology to reduce Britain’s carbon emissions at next week’s budget, in a riposte to Joe Biden’s flagship Inflation Reduction Act that aims to create thousands of new jobs.

Separately, the government plans to add urgency to Britain’s nuclear programme, with a competition to develop small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs).

Jeremy Hunt will announce a “reset” of government efforts to clean up the UK’s domestic energy supply and safeguard energy security at next Wednesday’s fiscal showpiece, including efforts to create up to 50,000 highly skilled green jobs.

Hunt and the energy secretary, Grant Shapps, have been under pressure to respond to Biden’s $369bn (£306bn) of climate subsidies, which have attracted a wave of green investment to the US and away from other countries, including the UK.

Although the Treasury has sought to play down the scope for tax cuts and spending increases in the budget, better than expected figures for growth and the public finances have provided the chancellor with some additional financial scope on Wednesday.

The Treasury said Hunt plans to announce “unprecedented investment” of £20bn spread over the next two decades into carbon capture and low carbon energy projects and “commit to spades in the ground on these projects from next year”.

Carbon capture and storage is the process of capturing carbon dioxide emissions from industrial activity such as steel and cement production, transporting it, and then locking it into underground storage sites.

The move will comes as a relief to developers of a string of carbon capture projects, which have been awaiting government approval. These include the Acorn CCS project designed to support the