Examination of Witnesses (Questions 640
- 644)
WEDNESDAY 7 JUNE 2006
MR TONY
BOSWORTH, MR
SIMON BULLOCK,
MR RICHARD
DYER AND
MR PETER
LIPMAN
Q640 Colin Challen: I just wanted
to ask you one thing relating to a previous discussion about setting
a carbon budget, particularly relating to transport. What are
your respective attitudes to the Government's decision to offset
their travel across all departments and supposedly make it carbon
neutral? Have you got a position on such schemes?
Mr Dyer: It is a positive thing
that the Government are taking a lead on that. If you are asking
more broadly about the question of offsetting in general, and
it is particularly prominent at the moment in the media to do
with flying, in a way it has a role to play but it can be seen
as just pacifying people's guilt about flying and feeling they
can go on not changing their behaviour and that is not the sort
of thing we would want to see. I think we would want to see people
changing their behaviour as well rather than just saying, "I
am going to carry on with saving emissions in an offset way".
Q641 Colin Challen: Do you encourage
your members to offset or do you just take a neutral stance on
it?
Mr Dyer: We are in the process
of developing a policy on that.
Q642 Colin Challen: The Government
is ahead of the NGOs for once!
Mr Lipman: I think there are significant
dangers in offsetting, partly because of the fundamental point
about it being a sop to conscience and making us think we do not
need to change the way we behave, but also partly because the
offsetting schemes often do not work. I think planting trees is
a great idea but it does not offset. We are talking about carbon
that has been stored for millions of years being released by using
fossil fuels and planting trees which will live for 20, 40, 100
years. That is ludicrous. What is the long term perspective on
that? We are also talking about the fact that when researchers
in Scotland put a mesh over a forest and measured the carbon coming
off it they found that unless you manage it particularly carefully
even currently forests can be carbon sources, not carbon sinks
and, definitely because of the impact of climate change, by somewhere
between 2020 and 2050 most forests will probably be carbon sources,
not carbon sinks, so the offsetting planted trees that we are
using now could well be pumping out carbon in the future. Offsetting
is ridiculously cheap. It makes us feel like this is an easy solution.
One of the reasons it is cheap is that we are exporting our pollution.
I can jump on a flight around the world and I can salve my conscience
by spending probably about £15 ensuring that people in Soweto
have low energy light bulbs. That is just a new form of carbon
imperialism. We are saying that it is all right for me to pollute
if those people there somehow become cleaner. I think there are
really significant issues to be worked out around offsetting and
we certainly would not at this stage say that we could endorse
it. I think for there to be offsetting schemes that start to be
more acceptable we need to move away from tree planting and we
need to move towards ideas that impact on what we do in this country
rather than saying we are going to give low energy light bulbs
to Soweto. For me a rational offsetting scheme would not be just,
say, I give some money and then I go on behaving as I do. It would
be tying in to a commitment to first of all work out how much
carbon I am emitting overall and then year on year reduce it as
an individual. An offsetting scheme with a reducing carbon cap
makes a lot of sense.
Q643 Colin Challen: You will be pleased
to hear that 57 Members of Parliament have signed up to reduce
their carbon emissions by 25% over five years. China and India
are developing their economies very rapidly with huge increases
in road and air travel. Do you think there is anything that the
UK can do to alleviate the problems that we could research into
that? Have we some way that we can influence them?
Mr Lipman: There is already a
scheme being funded by a partnership between DfID and the World
Bank, which is the Global Transport Knowledge Partnership. When
you look into that a lot of what it is doing is showing people
how to build roads, so it is a disaster. If we are going to help
other people avoid the mistakes we have made—and it is really
important to remember that what other countries are trying to
do is follow the route we took first—showing them how to
build roads is not the way to go. The clearest help would be for
us to lead by example surely and say, "These are sometimes
hard and difficult decisions, the changes we are making at home,
and we can only hope that you will follow those".
Colin Challen: In phase two of this programme
we will determine how to widen the roads.
Q644 Joan Walley: Can I just ask
about inland waterways and coastal shipping? In view of what you
said about aviation and the need for an aviation emissions trading
scheme can you tell us what your view is on shipping?
Mr Bosworth: Shipping is not an
area that we work on but we are aware that international shipping
emissions, like international aviation, are not included in current
inventories and so that is distorting the overall figures and
in a way it increases the scale of the challenge that we face.
The research which we have commissioned from the Tindall Centre
which will be appearing soon will be touching on emissions from
shipping.
Mr Lipman: Also, all the indications
are that shipping is where the dirty fuel gets dumped and the
most polluting fuel is being used.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed
for coming in. We have covered a lot of very useful ground.
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