The Paris climate change deal spells the beginning of the end for cooking and heating with gas, experts claimed yesterday.

Within 15 years, British families may have to start phasing out gas cookers, fires and boilers if the UK is to meet new tougher targets aimed at halting rises in global temperature.

The United Nations agreement to stop global warming, approved by 195 countries at a summit in Paris after two weeks of intense negotiations, commits nations to reducing greenhouse gases from 2020 onwards to halt climate change.

Grandiose gestures: The US secretary of state John Kerry addresses delegates at the COP21 climate summit in Paris, where 195 nations agreed to try and limit global warming by 'well below' 2C

It was hailed as historic by politicians. David Cameron said: ‘This global deal now means that the whole world has signed to play its part in halting climate change.’

But Britain’s energy plans will now have to be revised as our already stringent targets to reduce greenhouse gases are based on limiting global warming to a rise of 2C.

The new agreement is more ambitious, aimed at limiting warming to ‘well below’ 2C by the century’s end.

The UK is ‘absolutely committed’ to the deal and will be ‘making sure we deliver on it’, Energy Secretary Amber Rudd said yesterday.

Experts predict the stricter targets will mean the familiar sights of gas hobs and ovens and gas-fired boilers will become a thing of the past.

Jim Watson, professor of energy policy at Sussex University, said: ‘This will affect the power sector first, but as we move through to the 2030s and beyond we’ll have to find new ways of heating our homes and cooking our food.’

The French foreign minister, pictured waving, revealed the 'historic' legally binding agreement, which aims to limit global temperature rises, to more than 190 officials in Paris

The Government’s Committee on Climate Change is pressing for alternatives to boilers such as heat pumps – devices which extract warmth from the ground or air.

It wants four million homes to be heated by such devices by 2030, despite each costing £12,000, with installations accelerating after that until gas plays a minimal role in heating and cooking in homes by 2050.

All gas-fired power stations must also close by the mid-2030s unless they strip CO2 from emissions.

Professor Watson added: ‘Gas has served us very well since the 1970s. Whatever we move to next, people will be moving to similar levels of comfort and controllability, which engineers need to get on with.’

Around 23million British homes use gas, with a third of natural gas used in Britain burnt by domestic boilers, cookers or heaters.

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Britain is already committed to phasing out coal fired power stations by 2025.

But gas power stations will have to be phased out next, unless a way is found of capturing the CO2 they create – known as carbon capture and storage.

Gas, although cleaner than coal, is our biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions – generating 169million tons of CO2 in 2014.

Bob Ward, who is policy director at the Grantham Research Institute of Climate Change, said that to meet Britain’s commitments the days of cooking with gas were numbered.

He said: ‘The only possible use of fossil fuels that will continue is if they are used to generate electricity, but this will only happen if the carbon dioxide they create is captured and stored.

‘Gas cookers will be phased out, probably as soon as possible. I suspect manufacturers will simply stop making them.’

He added that in years to come some form of carbon tax putting up the cost of gas is inevitable – which will make electric cookers much cheaper than their gas rivals.

CCC chief executive Matthew Bell said: ‘For something like heating, by 2050 gas will be playing a much more limited role and a range of other technologies will have taken its place, meaning low-carbon sources of warmth – heat pumps and so on.’

What a load of rubbish! ROSS CLARK on how the lavish green summit in Paris created a mountain of waste and pollution

To adapt Winston Churchill, never before in the history of climate summits have so many people expended so many of the Earth’s resources in the cause of so little.

In spite of world leaders at the Paris Climate Summit making the grandiose gesture of saying they want to limit the rise in the Earth’s temperature to 1.5 Celsius instead of 2 Celsius, they have so far committed themselves to precious little practical action.

That’s not to say that the implications aren’t extraordinary. It has already been suggested that developed nations will together have to pay $100billion a year to smaller nations to help them combat climate change, so dire have been the predictions about the future during the endless Parisian discussions.

Greenpeace protesters tried to draw a yellow sun around the Arc de Triomphe during the talks that culminated in a historic deal on Saturday, but the £130million conference has already cost the Earth, says Ross Clark

But how much have the 40,000 delegates who have attended the £130million Paris summit already cost the Earth?

According to the French government, the carbon footprint of the ten-day summit will have been 21,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

That is itself as much as is emitted by 1,000 typical British families over the course of a year – taking into account running their home, their cars, their foreign holidays, the food and everything else they consume.

Air travel will have added an extra 40,000 tonnes of carbon emissions to the Paris total

Yet cheekily, the French government figure only included CO2 emissions created at the site of the conference. It excluded emissions from hotel stays and those generated by delegates travelling to and from Paris.

As many of the delegates will have travelled to Paris by air, this will have added a huge extra footprint to the event.

At least five world leaders – those of the US, China, India, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait – travel around in their own private jumbo jets.

According to Kornelis Blok, of Dutch environmental consultancy Ecofys, air travel will have added an extra 40,000 tonnes of carbon emissions to the Paris total.

As for carbon emissions from hotels, luxury hotels are voracious users of energy. A single room can consume almost twice as much energy as the average UK household, electricity and heating combined.

Taking everything into account, and on the assumption that the average delegate will have run up 9,000 air miles travelling to and from the event, the US technology magazine Wired calculates that emissions spewed out could reach 300,000 tonnes – the equivalent emitted in a whole year by a town the size of Aylesbury (population: 58,740). Laughably, the organisers of the summit based their carbon footprint figure on the assumption that delegates would arrive by bike or take up the offer of free passes for public transport – passes which cost French taxpayers £56million.

It was fanciful, though, to imagine that the grandees of the climate change lobby would stoop to the level of using public transport. On the second day of the summit a bicycle rack for 50 cycles at Le Bourget was reported to have just two bikes in it, while footage showed world leaders arriving in their usual limousines.

SO WHAT'S IN THE AGREEMENT? The draft agreement sets a global goal of peaking greenhouse gas emissions 'as soon as possible'. Its key points include: Limiting the rise in global temperatures to 2C above pre-industrial levels, with an eye to making it more like 1.5C

Introducing a five-year review system to increase ambition on cutting emissions

Funding for poorer countries It also calls for achieving a balance between man-made emissions and the Earth's ability to absorb them by the second half of this century. A previous draft included a section on 'loss and damage' - an issue pushed by small island nations and vulnerable countries who wanted the deal to recognise there are some impacts of climate change they cannot adapt to. However, an adjoining decision linked to the agreement in the final draft said the loss and damage article 'does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation'. Wealthy nations will, however, need to continue to provide financial support for poor nations to cope with climate change, the report said. Advertisement

Saving the environment isn’t just about cutting carbon emissions, of course. Housing the conference cost a small forest. Rather than using existing buildings, the French government built a small city of pavilions at Le Bourget for the conference, seven miles north of the centre of Paris.

A total of 50 contractors worked for 40 days, knocking up 80,000 square metres of temporary buildings and fitting them out.

The centrepiece, a ‘plenary room’ to seat 2,000 delegates, was supposed to be a model of environmentally-friendliness. Yet it alone required 900 trees to be sawn down. The organisers say they have replaced every one with a new tree – overlooking the fact that the new trees are saplings while the 900 sawn down were mature trees. While the delegates were trying to persuade each other to invest in renewable energy, the buildings were heated by a gas-fired boiler. Unbelievably, the organisers said this ‘helps reduce carbon emissions by 20 per cent’ because they could have used an oil boiler, but didn’t.

The Paris Conference made great claims that it would create ‘zero waste’. That was assuming the buildings, to be taken down after the event, could be used again. They might just struggle, though, to find many people in need of a 2,000-seater plenary room.

The organisers said that reusable coffee cups did away with the need for two million disposable plastic cups. Yet reusable cups are not nearly as environmentally friendly as the organisers would have us believe as washing them consumes a lot of energy. According to environmental consultancy Carbon Clear, a ceramic coffee cup would have to be used 354 times before it has used less energy than a plastic cup.

Hotel guests are particularly heavy generators of rubbish, what with all the little shampoo bottles, bars of soap, and uneaten croissants which are thrown out.

Over the ten-day summit, the 40,000 delegates would have produced 920 tonnes of rubbish. That is as much as is produced by 900 UK households in an entire year – so much for a ‘waste-free summit’.

Many delegates would have headed home from Paris with a warm glow of satisfaction, thinking they had helped save the planet. Yet the truth is the environmental impact they caused will be many times that of the vast majority of the Earth’s population.