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Lord Haworth: My Lords, I rise to make this short contribution to the debate on climate change with some trepidation. When the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, was General Secretary of the Labour Party, he was my boss. The noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, the Government Deputy Chief Whip, was my predecessor in my previous post. He relieved me somewhat by leaving at the start of the debate, giving me what I hope was a cheery nod.
I have come here after working for the Labour Party for nearly 30 years, down the corridor in the other place and, for the past 12, as Secretary of the Parliamentary Labour Party.
I should also like to thank, as is traditional, those staff and officers of the House who have kindly helped me find my way around this end of the building and have been welcoming.
Whenever I can, I like to be in the mountains. Perhaps I should mention, in my maiden speech, that I believe that I am the first Member of your Lordships' House ever to have climbed all the Scottish Munros. For me, mountaineering and hill-walking are the best ways of recharging the batteries and refreshing the soul. This may help to explain why I chose Fisherfield in Ross and Cromarty as the territorial designation in my title.
Fisherfield Forest, which contains six of the most remote Munros, is one of the last great wildernesses in Britain and is maintained and cherished as such by Mr Paul van Vlissingen, who owns it. I sincerely thank him for raising no objection to my impertinence in wishing to have this in my title.
In many years of walking in the mountains—not just in Britain but in the Himalayas, the Pyrenees and the Alps—the enormity of glacial melting has become increasingly evident to me. Of course there are no glaciers in Britain, but we did have a small amount of permanent snow throughout the last century, high in Garbh Choire Mor of Braeriach. Two or three years ago, it finally melted—completely. In the Alps and the Pyrenees, the glaciers are in rapid retreat and, in some cases, have disappeared altogether. The guide books are well out of date within 10 years.
However, the most dramatic example for me came in 2002, when I went to Kabardino-Balkaria in the Caucasus to climb Mount Elbrus. Our party spent a couple of days acclimatising by walking up the Bezingi Glacier, which is the longest in Europe. On the lower glacier at least we were following in the footsteps of the 1958 British Caucasus Expedition, led by Sir John Hunt, later Lord Hunt, a Member of this House. The Bezingi Glacier is described in the Hunt expedition account as,
"flowing for four miles from a high pass on the border with Georgia, before making a right-angle turn towards the north and continuing for another six miles".
It was indeed 10 miles long in 1958. Three years ago, it measured about nine-and-a-half miles, a retreat of 800 yards in 44 years. The local evidence was that the pace of its retreat was speeding up.
A month after our return from the region, there was a catastrophic event in nearby North Ossetia when the Kolka glacier collapsed, killing 140 people. The subsequent technical investigation showed that the Kolka incident was both unprecedented in its scale and of considerable wider significance. There is no doubt that the glaciers are melting and that they are doing so at an alarming and accelerating rate.
I welcome the report. It is a mine of information and a model of lucidity. It deserves to be more widely read. I welcome the Government's commitment to putting climate change at the top of the agenda of the G8. I applaud our target of producing 10 per cent of our electricity from renewable sources by 2010 and the aspiration to double that by 2020.
I should have liked to say more about of renewables, especially wind farms, but the shortage of time suggests that I should leave that for another occasion, because I want to say something about the importance of nuclear power. Paragraphs 139 and 140 of the report are relevant here. They state the obvious succinctly:
"nuclear power generates no carbon dioxide emissions . . . though there are serious arguments about the disposal of waste".
As the noble Lord, Lord Renton of Mount Harry, pointed out, the report notes that French nuclear power stations generate about 75 per cent of their electricity needs, as opposed to our 20 per cent. It concludes with this sentence:
"The question of further investment in nuclear power should attract more attention in the EU, as worries about climate change increase".
In 2020, even if the 20 per cent renewables aspiration can be achieved, which many doubt, where will the other 80 per cent come from? Our existing nuclear stations will be increasingly decommissioned. We cannot have another dash for gas; and surely we will not be building great new coal or oil-fired stations.
Taking the crucial decision to restart the nuclear programme is, I believe, the issue that faces the Government—any government. I hope that this Government will face it bravely and soon.
The Duke of Montrose: My Lords, it is a great pleasure to rise to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Haworth, of Fisherfield, on his maiden speech in your Lordships' House, especially because, as a Lancastrian, he has had the breadth of mind to claim a connection with Scotland in his title, which is situated in Ross and Cromarty.
He has a history of long and distinguished service to the Labour Party, of which he gave your Lordships some description, and he also has a reputation for his enthusiasm for mountaineering. Not so long ago, my family owned a Munro—not a very big one, but it has
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always been a popular walk. If I say that it is a landmark celebrated by Robbie Burns, perhaps the noble Lord will know the one that I mean. The debate this evening has proved a good moment for the noble Lord to express his convictions in several fields that he lists as being his main interests and we look forward very much to hearing him many more times in the House.
I join other noble Lords in congratulating my noble friend Lord Renton and the whole of his committee on an extremely comprehensive report that will serve as a good framework for any discussion on how we progress our contribution to the consideration of climate change. My interest, to which I own up, is largely as a farmer and landowner.
The report is especially useful as it highlights the difference between the Kyoto treaty targets, the European Community proposals and the Government's aspirations. The fact that the Kyoto treaty has finally been ratified obviously means that the targets under the first two, for which any shortfall would trigger sanctions, have a much greater chance of being achieved.
I note from Hansard of 22 February that in his Answer to a Written Question from the noble Lord, Lord Judd, the Minister seems confident in our ability comfortably to achieve the 2012 target on greenhouse gas emissions although his phraseology is not quite so confident when it comes to the domestic target for CO2.
Our discussion today of the report is unfortunately somewhat hampered by the fact that it has taken so long to come before the House. This is a rapidly progressing field and a great deal has happened since the committee submitted its findings to print. Events have taken place in the past couple of weeks which have taken matters forward considerably. The report sensibly recommended the precautionary approach based on the publications of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2001. As my noble friend Lord Renton mentioned, that has certainly been vindicated by the reports last week of a presentation to the American Association for the Advancement of Science by Dr Tim Barnett. Noble Lords who saw those reports will have noted that to date most predictions have been based on observations of air temperature whereas the Scripps Institution of Oceanography report required the interpretation of over 7 million observations of water temperature in the oceans around the world. The fact that it identified an average rise of 0.5 degrees centigrade represents a far greater accumulation of thermal energy than would have been expected from simply measuring increases in air temperature. Those findings are about to be published in a peer-review journal. Among the conclusions offered—and this in some ways ties in with what the noble Lord, Lord Haworth, spoke about—was that climate warming will alter the snow levels in the American mountains and precipitate a water crisis in the western United States within 20 years. That, along with the other studies on the melting of polar ice caps, is bound to offer an opportunity for the United States to reconsider its stance on Kyoto. As the Prime Minister is making such a focus on climate change
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while chairman of the G8, can the Minister give any indication of what approaches the Government are likely to make to the US in that regard?
The nuts and bolts of all these proposals represent an area where there will be many complications. The situation has not been helped by the fact, as pointed out by my noble friend Lord Renton, that the Government have fallen out with the EU on our right to revise the national allocation plan which we submitted last April. It is perhaps not such a good sign that, according to the Times last week, 17 of the 27 EU members have not yet had their plans agreed with Brussels. Part of the quarrel seems to focus around national governments wishing to be too generous to their own industries. Can the Minister tell the House what the reduction target is under phase 1 of the EU environmental trading scheme and whether at present, given the submissions by the countries, it is likely to be reached?
It is interesting to note that some trading in anticipated carbon permits appears already to have taken place in the forward market in European allowances. Trade in the actual allowances is still not possible for our UK industries. It would be good to think that they were not put at a disadvantage by any delay in a way which might affect their underlying economic position. It will be a help to most of those affected by the scheme that the Government published their provisional carbon dioxide emission allowances last week and have stated that any shortfall in the final settlement will affect only the power sector. We are told that the operators have a three-week consultation period to point out any estimated errors. Is the Minister able to say when the allocation of permits will take place; or will the Government feel that final allocation should be delayed until the dispute with Brussels is resolved?
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