Previous Section | Back to Table of Contents | Lords Hansard Home Page |
A change of language is needed. We talk of sustainable development and sustainable economies, but it is time to move on to restorative development and restorative economies. We need clearly enunciated principles which form the content of public education and which we can share and promotenew commandments, if one likes. I suggest four things that are unoriginal but central to this debate: leave the world a better place than you found it; take out no more than you need; try not to harm life or the environment; make amends if you do. That is not too theological, but it is at the centre of what we are setting ourselves to do this afternoon.
Regulatory frameworks are vital, but what the Prime Minister has described as,
depends on countless personal decisions, and something more than the conversion of light bulbs or the conclusions of developing science will be needed if we are to be successful in a campaign for the common good, which could easily be derailed by individual selfishness. I hope that the Committee on Climate Change will be able to look also at the effectiveness of the public education effort.
As we have heard already, one of the fruits of the consultation period has been a highlighting of the theme of adaptation, which now has its own part in the Bill. In London, the mayors team is preparing the first regional climate change adaptation strategy in the UK and the first for a world city. Consultation on the plan will begin in January next year. As the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, pointed out, it is urgent. The new Lord Mayor said in his Guildhall speech:
It is a very sobering thought that London is ranked within the top ten cities globally at risk for catastrophic natural disaster.
We have cause for concern about the impact of extreme weather events, but as the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, so powerfully pointed out, and as so many other surveys have emphasised, the immediate impact will fall principally on the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world. The committee needs among its membership people who are sensitive to this international development dimension. We hang together in confronting this challenge, or we shall certainly hang separately.
Lord Waldegrave of North Hill: My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London, whom subsequent generations will come to see as one of the most distinguished to hold his great officeand it is a distinguished line that he follows in.
This debate, as the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, said, is an historic one. In discussing this matter, we are not really recognising the scale of what we are doing. If this Bill passes into law improved in various ways, as I hope that it will, nothing about the way in which we do things will ever be quite the same again in this country. The noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, referred to the abolition of slavery and I thought of the abolition of the corn laws. It is something that is going to run through generations and change our behaviour in myriad different ways, if we take it seriously.
The consensus that we have todaythe noble Lord, Lord Lawson, is not in his seatwill soon break up. I was once Chief Secretary to the Treasury, where I found that all my colleagues were in favour of cutting public expenditure in the generality but never in the particular. It will be much the same with carbon emissions; there will be many special cases. I passionately believe that there will be a place for civil nuclear power. The consensus will not be easily found on that matter, but we will need to do itand there will be many other similar issues.
I welcome the Bill and congratulate my old sparring partner the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, on the way in which he introduced it. I shall comment on two aspects. The committee or commissionI do not much mind what it is calledis absolutely crucial if the legislation is to work for the length of its time. It is of course right that the Secretary of State, accountable to Parliament and through Parliament to the people, retains the ultimate responsibility. If we do not have the democracy behind what we are doing, it cannot be done. Not everything can be devolved to an outside committee, but the committee will need to have great prestige, authority and independence. As my noble friend Lord Taylor said, it will need to contain scientists, and I see at least two, the noble Lords, Lord Rees and Lord Oxburgh, who would do extremely well, although they may not thank me for that recommendation. It will also need to contain economists and those who understand the social implications of what is happening. This is not just a scientific matter; nothing of this importance can be, although science is at the heart of it.
If the carbon budgets are to have public acceptance in each period, the work that lies behind them must be of the highest quality and the committee will need to have figures of very significant stature on it. If it is to win that acceptance, as I hope it willand if it does not, a large part of this Bill will be nugatoryit could have some other things added to it. Various suggestions have been made. The sort of role that we are looking for here is the role played by the Committee of Imperial Defence in the height of the empire or, in its narrower
27 Nov 2007 : Column 1144
Assuming success, the committee needs to be given three additional duties. First, if I heard the Minister rightand I apologise to him if I did notI think he accepts that it should have the duty to advise the Secretary of State on the target for 2050, not only on the budgets necessary to reach that target. If it comes to believe that the target is wrong it cannot do its work unless it says so, and can recommend as much to the Secretary of State. The Minister is nodding, and I think that must be an improvement that it is necessary to make.
Secondly, and perhaps more controversially, the committee should have a duty of public education. Throughout this long campaign, there will be, as there are now, passionate debates about many aspects. There will be disagreements, conspiracy theories and eloquent booksmostly written by my neighbour in Somerset, Mr Christopher Bookerand they will be worth reading and arguing with. But somebody needs to have the duty to analyse and present what is being said in such a way that the public has the ordinary language capacity to understand what the debate is about, or we will lose support. It will be no goodeven my friends, the great scientists, are sometimes guilty of thissimply saying that everyone who disagrees is a little potty. That was the line taken by many of my noble friends in favour of the European Union. It did not entirely work to say that anyone who disagreed with them was just potty; it seemed to feed the counterargument in some way. There is a duty with regard to public education. Some of the powers are nearly there. Clause 30(1)(c) contains a duty to provide advice on climate change generally, and the committee is allowed to carry out research. An additional power to have a role in public education in this matter would be useful.
The third duty that I would land on the committee relates to Part 4. Here I strongly agreed with what the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, said. This is a weak part of the Bill at the moment which needs strengthening. I happen to be on the pessimistic wing. Every Christmas for some reason my children give me a little book entitled Thoughts fromEeyore, so perhaps it is just my temperament that is pessimistic. None the less I think that there is a case for being pessimistic. If the floating ice goes and we lose that reflectivityforget the ice on Greenlandwe shall see things happen very much more quickly than the international consensus now suggests. Let us hope that it is not so.
I am absolutely certain that whatever we do internationally, and if all the international efforts are successful, we will need a great deal of adaptation and we will need to start thinking about that, budgeting for it and persuading people about it right now. I am not quite a Lovelockian but I am on that wing. Noble Lords will remember that he is quite calm about the whole thing. He says that several hundred million people will survive all this. Mostly they will live in the Mendip Hills, as far as I understand him, which may become a little crowded. But, more seriously, if things get worse than we say, can this committee avoid
27 Nov 2007 : Column 1145
I mentioned one of my distinguished friends in Somerset who thinks that all this is a scare. Let us hope that he is right. Would it not be wonderful if it all turned out to be nonsense and a miraculous feedback mechanism in the planet ate up all these greenhouse gases? We are talking about greenhouse gasesall the gases are listed in Clause 64not just carbon dioxide. If it turned out that the planet had an astonishing capacity to deal with all this by itself, that would be wonderful. Is that a plausible way to go forward? No, it is not. Having undertaken an enormous experiment in climate chemistry for the last 150 years, we now haveas the right reverend Prelate, the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, and many others saidto start dealing with the consequences.
The problem with scares and their rhetoric is that if you take action people say, That was just a scare. Imagine that in 1925 or 1930 a more robust British Government had maintained our armaments somewhere nearer the colossal level of 1918, and that Hitler had therefore taken the view that it would be foolish to push west and had gone east only. Would it not now be a large part of the consensus that those people who said that Hitler was a dangerous fellow for us were just scaremongers? He would never have bothered us at all. If we act successfully, I suspect that the Minister and all of us will in due course be teased by people who will say, It was all a scare. That will arise because we have taken the necessary action in time. That is where I end. This is an historic day on which this country is beginning to rearm itself for the defence of the planet. It will be a very long process but nothing could be more important than the Bill which the Minister put before us today.
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer: My Lords, it was a privilege to serve on the Joint Committee looking at the draft Bill and I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, is able to say that he enjoyed chairing it, because he certainly did it very well and with a very light touch. It was not easy to bring the committee to a consensus on many of the issues. It is a triumph that he got through the entire thing without a minority report being produced, as there were some strong arguments. Because of that, it is particularly incumbent on the Government to take seriously the recommendations of the Joint Committee.
I want to talk about two things today. First, there is the recommendation from the committee, which the Government seem to intend to refute, on international emissions trading. The Government have rightly claimed that the Bill is a world leader, as it will be if it concentrates on what the UK will do to reduce its
27 Nov 2007 : Column 1146
That is addressed in paragraph 27 on page 84 of the Governments response to the pre-legislative scrutiny. The Government argue that foreign credits will count where they would result in reductions that would not have happened anyway. A low level of allowance for such a scheme may be sensible in the beginning, but the level must be capped radically over time. I hope that during the passage of the Bill we will debate not whether there should be a cap but at what level that cap should be and how rapidly it should be reduced.
Paragraph 28 is also important because it talks of the necessity for the Government to have no wriggle room when reporting emissions reductions. It must be clear which reductions are purely domestic and which result from reductions abroad that are funded by the UK. The Government say that they do not want to be bound by a code of reporting practice or audit arrangements that put that difference beyond doubt. That is a disappointing response and I hope that the Governments attitude will change, because the Bill needs to be amended to ensure that such arrangements are in place.
I also want to talk about issues of morality. I am cheered that that word has been used so much already in this debate. This is to do with personal morality and personal responsibility. There is a place to discuss personal carbon allowances, which were touched on in our questioning of witnesses, but perhaps not enough. The allowances give individuals choice over how they will make savings.
I have been a bit surprised that the NGOs are not keener on this. I think of members of Greenpeace speaking at the Liberal Democrat party conference, when I had quite an argument with them about why they did not see individual responsibility as important. I think that the answer is that they see the levers of power as better and easier to pull, but I believe that individuals and their behaviour are the key to all this. We have to make sure that individuals are empowered to start making choices. If personal carbon allowances are a good mechanism to do so, that would be a progressive scheme. Yes, it would hit those who drive up and down to and from second homes. Yes, it would hit those who weekend abroad by plane. Yes, it would hit those who want to heat their homes to 80 degrees in winter and go around in a T-shirt. However, that is pretty fair and pretty moral. Those who use less would have allowance to sell. It will be a complicated mechanism and setting a cap for it will be tricky, but it needs to be done.
I am pleased to say that two eminent bodies are already working on this. The RSA produced a good interim report, Carbon Limited, with a number of recommendations. The IPPR think tank is doing similar, complementary work. We could pilot these
27 Nov 2007 : Column 1147
In evidence to the Joint Committee, David Miliband said that he was an enthusiast for the idea of PCAs and that it was worth researching. In fact, it is being researched and is worthy of much more than just research, because it gives individuals power and choice on how to arrive at a low-carbon future. Government can do their bit by setting the tax regime and business and industry can do their bitthey already have trading schemesbut in the Bill we have to address how individuals are to be empowered. I suggest that we table amendments to enable us to do that.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: My Lords, I commend the Government for the Bill and support the proposals for statutory emissions reduction targets and carbon budgeting and trading schemes, but I agree with the recommendation of the Joint Committee on the draft Bill that the compliance mechanism for carbon budgets needs to be strengthened. We need an effective mechanism to ensure that something actually happens if it looks as if we are not hitting the targets. The Government could commit to purchasing domestic and international carbon credits if the budget were off track. However, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, that a cap is needed on the purchase of overseas credits if we are not to risk overly focusing on carbon reduction globally, rather than re-engineering the UK to a low-carbon economy. If we were off-beam on targets, the Government could help with credits from a fund set up specifically to stimulate low-carbon development to achieve that re-engineering.
I wish to focus on Part 4, which is about adaptation. I should declare an interest as the chief executive of the Environment Agency. The Minister may be looking for Prince Charming, but I am afraid that all I can offer is Queen Canute. Adaptation is the poor relation of the climate change agenda. The global focus has been primarily on mitigation and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Managing the impacts of climate change is important and pressingthe summer floods and the recent storm surge on the east coast were but individual examples of just how pressing they are. It is not just about floods but about drought, heat and extreme weather generally. No matter how successful we are in reducing carbon emissions, there is enough carbon already in the atmosphere to cause these extreme weather events and other impacts with increasing frequency. That will affect the economy, the quality of peoples livesparticularly poor peoples livesand, indeed, life and limb.
I welcome the duty in Part 4 on the Secretary of State to report to Parliament every five years on the risks of the impacts of climate change and the programme of measures to adapt to those risks. I welcome the Governments intention in the new year to bring forward an adaptation plan. However, that element of the Bill needs further strengthening; I was pleased to hear other noble Lords say that it was perhaps the weaker part of the Bill.
Perhaps I may bring to the Houses notice two areas that require further strengthening. The Committee on Climate Change will take a very effective roleparticularly if amendments on it are tabled in your Lordships Housein scrutinising independently the mitigation targets, the budget and the programme. I believe that we need a similar committee, as an advisory group, to provide independent and expert scrutiny of progress on the adaptation programme. That group needs to be separate from the Committee on Climate Change so that the adaptation element of the agenda is given a proper focus. However, it needs to be carefully timetabled to ensure that its view on the adaptation risks and impacts and on how well prepared we are for them feeds into the considerations of the Committee on Climate Change in giving advice to government on setting targets and budgets.
The second strengthening was brought home by the summer floods but it is not a new issue. All the reports on floods over the past 10 years and longer have pointed out how vulnerable our vital infrastructure is in this country to the impact of, in those days, flooding and, increasingly these days, all the effects of climate change. I am talking not just about electricity switching stations and waterworks but also about roads, railways, hospitals, police stations, fire stations, healthcare premises and, distressingly, Environment Agency offices. Our regional control centre was in Tewkesburya rather ill advised choice, I think. These are issues that have been connected only with the floods, but many of our important electrical installations will not operate at high temperatures, so we have to think through in a rounded way the impacts and how such critical infrastructure can be made climate change-resilient for the future.
I welcome very much the Prime Ministers commitment last week to bring forward an amendment to the Bill to introduce risk-based monitoring and statutory guidance to encourage the providers of these infrastructures to think about climate change in what they do. If I understand it correctly, the plan is that there will be statutory guidance and that the Government will assess whether all the bodies that need to take action, of which there are manythere could be several thousandhave done enough and will then wait to see what further action needs to be taken. I think that we have waited to see for quite a long time. We have waited to see since 1998 and, lo and behold, we saw in the summer that critical infrastructure flooded, so we need an amendment that is tougher than may currently be planned.
The Environment Agency has assessed the number of all sorts of pieces of vital infrastructure that are at high risk of flooding and I do not think that it would be a surprise to say that, at the moment, our key public services are simply inadequately protected. We need action now. I believe that an amendment should be brought forward now placing a duty on public bodies, public authorities and the providers of critical infrastructure to assess the risks of climate change to their functions and to put in place an action plan to reduce those risks. There are already parallels in existing legislation with the Civil Contingencies Act. Can the Minister say in his response whether he will be able to bring forward the text of the government
27 Nov 2007 : Column 1149
The noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, talked about urgency. Time is of the essence in reducing carbon emissions but it is even more of the essence in the adaptation agenda because the impacts that we are seeing now will be seen increasingly frequently. My noble friend Lord Puttnam also said that, if we get these issues wrong, they will fall upon our children and our childrens children. I very rarely take issue with my noble friend but I will on this occasion. I do not think that this is an issue for our children and our childrens children; the adaptation agenda is an issue for us all nowfor noble Lords, for me and for the people in the Gallery. Let us see this good Bill strengthened as it goes through our House so that it becomes an excellent Bill.
Baroness Uddin: My Lords, it is a privilege to take part in this very important first for the United Kingdom and for the world and I welcome the Bills introduction in this House. Voices from organisations ranging from the CBI to Christian Aid have called for urgent action on climate change and I am proud that this Parliament is introducing the first Bill that makes clear the task facing us and commits us as a country to meeting our obligations for a safer world.
Next Section | Back to Table of Contents | Lords Hansard Home Page |