Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100
- 119)
MONDAY 14 MAY 2007
MR MARTYN
WILLIAMS AND
MS RUTH
DAVIS
Q100 Lynne Jones: Once it is from
the Government the Government will then decide what it is going
to accept and what it is not and then it will whip the vote in
terms of what they propose, whereas if this is an independent
committee which has made a recommendation and put that to Parliament,
it will be much more difficult to whip it without Parliament being
seen to be just doing the Government's bidding rather than what
an independent adviser has recommended.
Mr Williams: You have convinced
me. It is true that there is a challenge for the way in which
Parliament will have to deal with this Bill in a way, is there
not, because if people are seen to be missing targets then something
needs to be done about it? As far as the judicial review comes
in, first of all Parliament ought to be approving and disapproving
of the Government's responses to the Committee, but there could
be a route through that where you leave the government bit out.
Also, if the Committee has recommended a particular course of
action is necessary and the Government decide to ignore the Committee's
advice and that advice is well founded in science and well researched
and has real weight, then it may be possible for a group like
Friends of the Earth to bring a judicial review against the minister
who decides to ignore that advice. That decision to ignore the
advice or to do something different to what he had been advised
may be reviewable in the courts. The advantage of that is, a bit
like Parliament as well, that you have two ways of keeping the
Government to the advice they are given, that it happens in advance
so you are not just waiting for failure. The disadvantage is that
bringing in such a review is prohibitively expensive and very
difficult to do. It can be successful. We saw Greenpeace successful
recently in reviewing the nuclear consultation decision and a
court finding that was not acceptable and telling the Government
it had to do it again. In a similar way it could be possible for
an NGO in the future to bring a judicial review which found that
climate change policy was not up to the job and the Government
would have to go back and do it again. The advantage is that that
would happen in advance rather than waiting until all the targets
had been missed and then saying it was a bit late.
Q101 Chairman: You advocated a rather
novel procedure in your evidence where you actually suggested
that if we missed the target then the Government should go out
and buy the deficit.
Ms Davis: That was us and it was
mildly tongue in cheek. I was trying to investigate what mechanisms
there are currently available for ensuring that Government meets
its own environmental obligations. The most effective one, interestingly
enough, is the sanction which is imposed when it infringes EU
legislation, which is a fine. On the whole Government do not like
paying those fines and tend to respond rather rapidly to the prospect
of infraction procedures. The problem with the proposal of going
out and buying credits is that the perception would be that you
had bought your way out of the problem. The way round that, if
you were going to try to turn it into a financial penalty, would
be to try to set the level at which you were buying those credits
so punitively high that no Government would want to find itself
in a position where it was paying that amount of money. It has
potential as an idea, depending on how high you set that level.
What I am not proposing is that people just go out and buy carbon
credits in the market according to the price they are now because
Government will probably do that anyway as one way of seeing that
it can meet its own targets within the five-year period.
Q102 Chairman: In a way the Bill
is a bit like a gutless wonder in that there is not actually anything
inside it that represents sanction, apart from the potential appearance
in court. There is nothing, for example, that empowers the Committee
to make recommendations as to where additional resources in a
forthcoming period should be deployed to address the area where
the worst of the deficit occurred or, conversely, to change the
fiscal regime to achieve those objectives. There is nothing like
that in it.
Mr Williams: Ultimately you have
to accept that any Bill which holds the Government to account
is going to be toothless at some point because a future government
can simply amend it, can they not; they can repeal it if they
want to? It is very difficult to hold a government to account.
It is a little bit like the difference between any sanction in
any Bill. The sanction for somebody speeding can be either to
fine them, throw them in prison, take their licence away on the
punishment side of it, or it can be to send them to a class about
safe driving in order hopefully to convince them that they should
do it in future. It is fair to say this is much more about—
Q103 Chairman: I was rather surprised
you did not suggest that the Secretary of State's salary should
be cut.
Mr Williams: We did in our own
Bill. There was one point when Elliot Morley was the Minister
when we had a silly conversation and he said that as long as it
could be increased if he met his target he would accept the Bill.
We should have taken him up on that.
Q104 David Lepper: While we are on
the issue of sanctions and the role of the Climate Change Committee
perhaps we could just look at a couple of other things about the
Committee. We have heard the suggestion this afternoon that the
makeup of the Climate Change Committee should be permanent, that
it should be full time and that there should be greater emphasis
on the scientific and technological expertise and that it should
have powers rather than simply be advisory. Would the two organisations
agree with all those things?
Ms Davis: I would not agree with
the extent of the proposition that Kevin was putting forward in
the evidence earlier, for the reasons which members of the Committee
pointed out. You may have to use a whole range of different instruments
to affect a whole range of different sectors in order to be able
to achieve your outcomes and they have very clear social and economic
impacts according to which one you choose at any given moment,
which affects all sorts of things other than climate change policy.
It seems to me that it has to remain within the gift of Government
to decide how they choose to meet those targets because of the
particular social implications of going down that route. That
does leave a difficult question then as to how you achieve a sensible
balance between a committee with teeth and one which actually
becomes a de facto non-governmental, non-elected policymaking
body with all sorts of implications. Things could be done to make
it a lot stronger than it is now. I do think that the representation
is quite bizarre. There is nobody with any experience of environmental
policy, for example, which just seems extraordinary to me. I also
think some of the ideas you were discussing with Martyn in relation
to the ability of the Committee to scrutinise proposals that Government
are putting forward and then to bring that scrutiny to Parliament
would be really well worth investigating. I do think probably
that the distinction between setting the targets and setting the
budget and critiquing the policies versus actually making policies
has to be maintained and the policymaking still has to lie with
Government and Parliament.
Mr Williams: I would probably
agree. I would say that the Committee should most certainly have
the power. It is bizarre that the Committee gets to advise on
how to set all the budgets and how to set the trajectory to the
2050 target, but it is not allowed to say whether the 2050 target
is the right one or not. To me that seems really quite bizarre.
It could do that absolutely expertly and we could get to the 60%
cut and find that was nowhere near enough and they would never
have had a chance to say that. It is crazy.
Q105 Chairman: With the Monetary
Policy Committee it is the Chancellor who sets the target for
inflation.
Mr Williams: Yes, but this is
supposed to be the expert committee which advises Government on
its climate change policy and they cannot advise it on the absolute
number one, most central aspect of it.
Q106 Chairman: I must say I agree
with you. I am just making the observation.
Mr Williams: It is a fair comment.
Q107 Lynne Jones: The target is going
to be set on the basis of the Bill. Are you saying it should be
a flexible target?
Mr Williams: It is a flexible
target already; it is allowed to be changed in the light of developments
in science or international agreements. It starts off inadequate
and may be changed in the future, but it does not ask the Committee
to advise on the way it should be changed or how it should be
changed, whereas every other aspect of the process from setting
the budget, seeing the trajectory to how much trading is used,
all of those sorts of things are all advised on by the Committee
but not that key target. The one other thing I would say is missing
from the makeup of the Committee is an assessment of the international
equity and the international agreements as to how we apportion
these carbon emissions between different countries. None of the
people and none of the expertise listed within the Bill reflects
those decisions and those moral decisions about how we cope with
this on a global basis.
Q108 Patrick Hall: May I come in
on that point about the target which must not be moved that would
be on the face of the Bill, whereas the Government are saying
five-year budgets should be built in to take on board new science
or understanding? How would the two organisations represented
here today amend the Bill then in order to address that key point?
Ms Davis: The first thing we would
propose is that what is enshrined on the face of the Bill is not
just a minimum target but is the overall environmental aim of
trying to stay within the two-degree safety limit and operating
under principles of global equity and that those two things should
be established as the actual environmental purpose of the Bill.
The purpose is not to achieve an 80% cut: the purpose is to avoid
dangerous climate change or at least for us to pay our fair share
in the world of dangerous climate change. That would help to start
off with. Tending to like belt and braces, as NGOs do, we would
probably also be happy to see a first bite at the target, at the
number, at the figure on the face of the Bill, because we would
not like to see it at this stage slip below an 80% level. We cannot
see any evidence that there is any reason why it should and that
is broadly in accordance with those principles of global equity,
then also to amend the Bill to enable the Committee on Climate
Change to have the capacity to adjust that end-point target according
to the principles which have been established on the face of the
Bill in relation to two degrees and global equity.
Q109 Patrick Hall: One point we have
not yet raised is to do with the elements of flexibility within
the five-year budget period. I believe the RSPB said there should
not be flexibility apart from that which is already proposed,
that is to say the ability to bank and borrow and whatever, but
also the ability to purchase credits from overseas which you raised
earlier on with the other people giving evidence. What is the
view of both of you on that? Should there be an ability to purchase
credits overseas or should that be limited to within the EU, as
the Tyndall Centre representative Dr Anderson suggested, or should
there be a cap on that which the Energy Saving Trust proposes?
Ms Davis: We would very much like
to see restrictions on the amount of trading and overseas credits.
We touched on some of the reasons earlier but there are two main
reasons from our point of view: the first is that actually, as
it stands at the moment, the two trading mechanisms, the trading
within the EU ETS and trading within the flexibility mechanisms
which are allowed within Kyoto, buying CDM or JI credits, are
both ones where there is no cap, capable of ensuring that we would
actually achieve our two-degree and global equity environmental
end goals. There is obviously a cap on the ETS, but as it stands
at the moment it is wholly inadequate to drive the kinds of changes
we need. In principle we support the idea of cap and trade schemes
as a way of achieving sensible and cost-effective reductions in
carbon, but when you have trading schemes which are effectively
trade rather than cap and trade schemes there is absolutely no
guarantee of a good environmental outcome. In that context we
would like to see some kind of restriction, but we do obviously
recognise the difficulties that members of the Committee raised
earlier about the fact that we obviously have a substantial amount
of our power-intensive industries and major power generators already
brought into the EU ETS. In that context we cannot undo that,
nor should we be seeking to do so, and there will inevitably be
a certain amount of trading. It is worth bearing in mind that
when individual countries put forward their national allocation
plans to the European Trading Scheme they themselves make an offer
as to how much of that they expect to be achieved through international
credits. It is not as though we do not have some ability to restrict
that as a country: we do. It is slightly fuzzy at the edges, because
if we are then trading in credits, and many other countries in
the EU have very high acceptability levels for international credits,
that makes that tricky, but at the moment we are already suggesting
our national allocation plan would be relatively low in international
credits. We would like to see that principle maintained in the
domestic accounting and the amount of credits used has to be absolutely
clearly delineated in the reporting. That is the other thing:
it must be completely obvious to people how much of this has been
the result of domestic efforts and how much of it is has been
the result of effectively buying in pardons.
Q110 Patrick Hall: Is that your position?
Mr Williams: Very similar position;
certainly all the same worries. We thought of three ways of potentially
restricting that trading to try to avoid too much leakage from
this carbon budget into other countries and other systems. One
would simply be to say that certain trading schemes are not robust
enough to be allowed at all; we would just rule them out, simple
as that, and have others which were judged as being robust enough
to be allowed. So it may be that the ETS was an allowable scheme
but some of the others were not. Another would be just to set
a crude limit and say you cannot trade more than 5 or 6 or 7 or
10% of the target. If 90% has to be delivered at home 10% can
be traded. This does not necessarily stop the leakage, but at
least it restricts it to a fairly small proportion of the budget.
Then the final way would be to be slightly more sophisticated
and to try to make some analysis of how leaky different trading
schemes were and to try to take account of that almost in an exchange
rate. If you know that saving one tonne of carbon in this country
through some scheme operating in Birmingham and then deciding
not to do that and buying a saving in from Bangalore, which seems
to be David Miliband's favourite place for trading from, and if
you know that Bangalore scheme is leaky in some way and actually
you need to buy two or three or four tonnes there in order to
make up for the one tonne you were going to save in Birmingham,
then you could have a kind of exchange rate. I believe that as
you have this Committee on Climate Change set up to be the experts,
they are the perfect people to advise on this, but we do need
something to restrict it so this budget does not become meaningless
and entirely bought overseas.
Q111 Chairman: Would you like to
say a word or two about the Bill's deficiencies on the subject
of adaptation? I think the RSPB's evidence commented on that.
Ms Davis: We obviously recognise
and welcome the need to focus on the mitigation problem but we
are also in a situation now where we have bought into a certain
amount of climate change and we increasingly understand what the
impacts of that are likely to be, even if that is just the two
degrees which we would all like to see it restricted at. We have
the greatest weight of evidence about impacts on the natural world
and potential impacts on natural resources and the livelihoods
of many of the poorest people in the world who have the least
ability to be able to respond to that. We think the Climate Change
Bill provides an opportunity for a Government to do two things:
one is to assess an integrated programme of action across the
sectors which are going to be most affected in the UK and the
second is to embed some principles along parallel lines to the
principle of global equity, which would underpin funding for adaptation
to protect natural resources, eco-systems and people.
Q112 Chairman: This is a bit woolly.
In your evidence it says "We will propose to Government that
they strengthen the provisions in the Bill to include an obligation
to bring forward a programme of action for adaptation, on a three-yearly
basis".[13]
Ms Davis: It is quite difficult
at this stage to try to propose the individual measures within
the Bill. What we are not proposing and which I do not think would
be appropriate, would be to have a huge extra packing case full
of individual actions that we propose Government should take as
part of its adaptation programme.
Q113 Chairman: Do you want a national
adaptation committee built into the Bill?
Ms Davis: No, I do not think so.
A programme of action which operated under certain clear principles
that might be, for example, making sure that you looked at sustainable
development across a range of different sectors, that you protected
natural resources and the natural environment whilst you were
bringing forward that programme, and that you protected those
people who were least able to respond financially to the problems
of climate change impacts, would create the kind of structure
we need for Government to start thinking about this.
Q114 Chairman: The reason I am a
bit cynical about this is that every year we comment on Defra's
Annual Report and the PSA targets are couched in the kind of language
you are talking about and we have the devil's own job pinning
down the Government to understand whether they are getting anywhere
near achieving some of this.
Ms Davis: That is a very good
point. The evidence also suggests that one of the things which
would be needed to be done very early on in that process would
be to try to identify what the actual ends as opposed to means
targets should be. It would be inappropriate for the RSPB to be
proposing end targets for an adaptation programme for flood risk
management, for example, in the evidence we put forward to the
Committee. I am not personally qualified to do that and I do not
necessarily think other people within my organisation are. I could
certainly propose some end points in terms of adaptation in relation
to biodiversity. Whether or not it is actually appropriate to
try to pin those into the Bill at this stage is another question.
More important is to get a structure and to get an obligation
on Government to identify what it thinks those end points should
be. For example, in the case of biodiversity, I would have said
that we would be looking for some kind of assurance that Government
will take the action necessary to deliver the 2010 target for
halting the loss of biodiversity in the face of climate change.
I feel qualified to make some sort of statement about that in
relation to biodiversity; I do not in relation to all of the other
sectors which are involved there. Please do not take that as a
suggestion that I do not think there should be end targets. It
is simply that I do not think it is necessarily my job to try
to invent all those across all the relevant sectors. I am sure
the NFU would not thank me if I started to try.
Q115 Mr Williams: You talked about
environmental protection, but that is different from adaptation,
is it not? I think it is Natural England who have proposed environmental
corridors so that species can move to areas which are more suited
to them. Do you have any ideas about that?
Ms Davis: There is some quite
disputed science around corridors. This has been a fashionable
slang word which has been used in the nature conservation world
for a very long time, but if you look at their impact on different
taxa they can quite easily become migration routes for invasive
species and they can also act as predator traps for certain species
moving along them. Birds tend not to use corridors, they tend
to move more effectively through the landscape if there is a series
of habitat features which provides them with food and shelter
actually embedded in the landscape. We try to talk about permeable
landscapes. Let me give you an example: very, very large areas
of monoculture, oil-seed rape and wheat, without hedges, ditches,
ponds in them are effectively an impermeable landscape for things
trying to move across that because they do not have sources of
shelter and food scattered through that landscape. There are easy
ways in which we could do something about that which would probably
assist species to move in response to climate change.
Q116 Mr Williams: It seems to me
that evolution takes place as a result of the changes in the environment.
Where they are too quick extinction takes place rather than evolution.
Do we have any idea how quickly evolution can take place in the
face of rapid change of the environment?
Ms Davis: Yes, we do have some
ideas and the rate of change varies very dramatically. In the
right circumstances, for example where you have glacial retreat
down a mountain, you can see in the palaeological record that
trees will track the snowline almost year for year; and that at
time, responses have been terribly rapid in those contexts, which
is a sign of hope. In other situations, it has been obvious that
there has been some kind of seismic shift which has left not just
a lag in terms of one environment turning into another, but also
no clear geographical pathway for things to move along. In these
cases, you can see extinctions as a result of fairly rapid change.
The biggest problem we have at the moment, is that we are looking
at a massively fragmented landscape in comparison with the one
where most of these changes have happened previously, which means
I am afraid that we have a lot of reasons to be pessimistic about
the response of biodiversity to climate change. That is one of
the core reasons for looking for additional investment in trying
to allow some of those species to respond.
Q117 Chairman: I want to draw our
questioning to a conclusion by seeking your observations in the
context of including matters connected with shipping and aviation
emissions at a later stage in the Bill as to the legislative route
by which one would have to approach that, namely the use of enabling
powers, whether you would be content for those aspects to be added
in later. What do you think about that?
Mr Williams: No. There is just
no sense to it. There is sense to having a clause in the Bill
which says that when an international agreement is reached which
allocates those aviation emissions to countries in a particular
way that the Bill is amended so that we use the internationally
agreed way of doing it consistent with other countries. At the
moment there is no such international agreement and there is not
really very much prospect of one arising any time particularly
soon. Negotiations are thoroughly stalled and blocked by some
fairly heavily vested interests who just do not want the issue
discussed. It is something of a myth to say that we cannot allocate
these emissions from aviation and shipping to the UK carbon account,
as it is called in the Bill, because we already do it. We actually
already report on the emissions from what are known as bunker
fuels for international aviation and shipping and we report them
under the Kyoto Protocol every year. The difference is that they
are reported as what is known as a memo item, so they do not form
a part of our target, but every year we have to say what we have
done to meet our target for domestic emissions and that our bunker
emissions were as follows. We believe that, seeing we have the
methodology and the thing is there, we should start using that
right from day one in order to include carbon dioxide in this
account and if that needs to be adjusted at some point in the
future you can guarantee that there will be a smaller adjustment
to our accounts than if we simply ignore it.
Q118 Chairman: Let me ask you a practical
question. There has been quite a lot of discussion about mechanisms
to deal with the aviation emissions, but virtually no discussion
about how you deal with shipping emissions. What instruments exist
for the UK Government to bear down on emissions from shipping?
Mr Williams: I am happy to answer
that, but the reason it should be in the Bill is more fundamental
than that. It is perfectly logically consistent, so you should
not do anything to deal with shipping emissions and you should
not do anything to allow aviation emissions to stop running at
that tremendous rate. It is just that if you are going to hold
that position, then you have to say that you are therefore going
to bear down on households or cars or industry in the country
in order to create the space for those emissions to grow. The
reason for including it in the Bill is not simply because we should
control those emissions, it is because without counting them it
is a bit like being on a diet where you count your calories but
you decide not to count calories from chocolate. It just will
not work. There are various technologies for making shipping more
efficient; it is really just the same as everything else. You
can cut down on the amount of goods which are shipped around the
world by buying and purchasing locally and using things which
are more local to us, but there will always be some trade in goods
and some ships travelling backwards and forwards and when you
do transport things by ship, you should do it in the most efficient
way possible.
Q119 Chairman: You have not actually
answered my question. You have given me a nice little commentary
about how you might have some strategy by adapting your supply-side
route but an awful lot of rather old and dirty ships and cruising
round the world chucking out as many emissions as aviation and
it is the silent partner. I come back. You have ships going round
the United Kingdom, ships going in and out. Apart from reducing
the amount of shipping what practical things can you do to bear
down on marine emissions?
Mr Williams: More efficient engines.
13 Ev 31 para 24. Back
| 
