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This reinforces the need for action now. That need has been reflected in a rising tide of concern across the world and a regular flow of high-level commitments, including quantitative commitments such as California’s aspiration to an 80 per cent cut by 2050 and the EU’s commitment of 20 per cent unilaterally by 2020 and 30 per cent if other countries also commit.
But the blunt fact is that, in the words used by the International Energy Agency in its 2007 World Energy Outlook, there has until now been “more talk than action”. The IEA notes that,
- “the number and strength of policies under consideration continues to grow faster than the number and strength of policies actually adopted”.
Allowing for the policies which have been adopted—the cap and trade systems in place, taxes imposed, energy efficiency regulations passed into law—the IEA’s reference scenario suggests that global emissions will rise by 57 per cent between now and 2030. This will leave us on a path more likely to lead to a 5 or 6 degree centigrade temperature increase than to a 2 degree centigrade increase. While allowing for the policies under consideration, and even assuming that the talk is translated into action, its alternative scenario still has emissions at 27 per cent higher in 2030 than today, with a best guess of a 3 degree centigrade rise against pre-industrial levels.
Globally, despite the talk, limited action has resulted so far. In the UK, while we are on target to
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Against that background, it might be possible to see the Bill as yet more talk rather than action. I believe that would be a great mistake. The Bill will create a strong discipline on government to take the necessary action. By establishing clear carbon budgets and an independent committee to advise on those budgets and to report on whether they are being met, the Bill will put pressure on government to propose and implement the measures necessary to stay within budget. It will provide a strong message to business that the effective price penalty of emitting carbon will inevitably increase over time.
Of course there are details of objective which will need to be debated and details of operation which will need to be got right. Given the new scientific evidence and the economic trends, there is an issue of whether the target should be higher than 60 per cent—perhaps 80 per cent—and that issue was clearly put on the table by the Prime Minister last Monday.
The extent to which the UK meets its targets by cutting emissions itself versus buying carbon credits from overseas is crucial. The theoretical case for international carbon trading to achieve lowest-cost emission reductions is a very strong, good case—but it is only a good case if we are confident that emission reductions truly are additional and permanent. At the moment, there are considerable doubts on that issue and it cannot be an alternative to putting the UK on a clear path towards a low-carbon economy.
Finally, within each budget period, the government will need to ensure steady annual progress towards the budget target, rather than leaving action until too late and then borrowing from the next budget period. It is important for us to debate how we are going to ensure that that occurs, and how the committee in its annual report will assess government progress in that regard.
There are important issues and concerns, but those concerns should not lead us to undervalue the Bill’s overall thrust. It will be the first Bill in the world that commits a national Government to specific legally entrenched targets and to creating an independent committee to tell the Government, if necessary, that they are off target. This debate raises questions of what legal targets mean in the absence of a clear set of defined sanctions, but the political reality is that, whatever the legal position, this will create a strong political pressure on the Government to deliver. It will be much more difficult for them to avoid their responsibility to bring forward and implement the measures required to meet the budgets. The Bill creates an external discipline on the Government and at times that will be uncomfortable for them, but it makes it more likely that we will stick to the required path. I therefore think that we should strongly welcome the Bill.
8.19 pm
Lord Redesdale: My Lords, I too welcome the Bill. I do not go so far as the noble Baroness, Lady Billingham, and say that this is a brave Bill; one of the
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The noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, said that there is a morality to moving forward on this issue. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London said that the Church of England sees it as a moral issue and as an organisation has tried to do as much as it can. I am very keen on some of the schemes that it has introduced throughout the country. If you talk to people around the country, you find that they also see this as a moral issue.
It has been interesting today to see that no one in the debate has questioned whether climate change is taking place, which means we have moved on from a few years ago when I know at least a couple of Peers would have stood up and questioned it. It is more a question of the speed with which climate change is taking place and how quickly government should react.
The major issue that will confront the Government—and as this is a Second Reading speech, we should highlight the issues over which they might face one or two difficulties—is the five-year target. Since people are talking about future technologies, I should say that over the weekend I was reading Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and there is a wonderful part where a spaceship is planted at Lord’s cricket ground but no one can see it because there is a technology called “Somebody Else’s Problem” and the ship is wrapped in a Somebody Else’s Problem field. I get the impression that the five-year target is based on that principle. I was always told that if anyone mentioned five years in parliamentary terms, that meant it was after the next election and therefore no one could seriously take it into account.
I find that people who talk about climate change also focus on the issue of China and India, which has been mentioned today. There is a feeling that there is no point in us doing anything—it is someone else’s problem—because China and India are growing so rapidly. However, I find that argument distressing. The Government of China are desperately worried about climate change because the rice harvest might fail and then they would have real problems feeding their population. There is also the moral question of whether we should use that argument at all, because the majority of China’s population live on under £2 a day. We, as one of the richest nations on the planet, who profligately use far more carbon than anyone in the developing world, feel it somehow unfortunate that we are even asked to try to curb our excesses. As my noble friend Lady Northover has pointed out, it is the poor who will suffer hardest as the situation moves forward.
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I hope the Government will take on board that there is unhappiness with the five-year target. We think a three-year target would be slightly better, with annual indicators. The problem I have with targets is that they are very prone to slippage. There was an example last year, when there was a massive increase in the amount of carbon used in the country because the spot price on gas went up very quickly last winter. The problem there was that, instead of us paying higher energy prices, many mothballed coal-fired power stations were fired up again to meet the demand, which caused an incremental increase in the amount of carbon being produced into the atmosphere.
If we used the trading scheme we could always say that we could counteract that by buying credits, but I feel there is a moral ambiguity about buying credits from overseas. Climate Change Capital has been mentioned today. I have had a meeting with that organisation—in fact, it seems to have affected many Peers in the building—and it has talked about some of the amazing things we can do. There are low-hanging fruit, such as reducing the amount of HFCs produced in China. That has an effect because of course carbon, like all greenhouse gases, knows no borders. However, as has been said, we should not try to export our problems. We should understand that, even though we talk about our carbon budget in this country, we have automatically exported a massive carbon burden by producing most of our goods in India and China. That is carbon for which we should be accountable.
We are going down the route of a Secretary of State saying in 2050 that we have reduced our emissions by 60 per cent, but that Secretary of State may not yet even have been born. Saying to somebody who may not yet have been born that they will have to be responsible for slippages in the system is an issue. That is why the Bill is to a degree aspirational. That it is aspirational in that area is not a bad thing, but if a Secretary of State misses the target, what sanction will they face? Under European directives, the sanction is a fine for the country, but I cannot see that happening in a British scheme.
We would like to see the Prime Minister, rather than the Secretary of State, made responsible for meeting the targets. On that, we share the view of the main opposition party and it will be interesting to see whether there is an amendment on it that we can both put forward. We hold that view because we have seen the first climate change casualty in the political sphere. There has been talk that the popularity of the Prime Minister of Australia was massively affected by his inability to agree on climate change. Although he changed his view towards the election, the electorate showed that it believed in climate change. Another country that has made massive changes is Canada. One warm winter last year which had amazing effects has moved climate change from the low to the high end of the list of political priorities.
It is interesting that we as politicians are lagging behind the public, who believe that politicians should do a great deal more than they are doing at the moment. I therefore think that the Bill is momentous or historic only in one fact: that it will be the first of many. We will probably be considering a climate change
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It is interesting that the Bill’s Second Reading is in the same week as Heathrow’s next runway is being given the go-ahead. I heard somebody say on the radio this morning: “Well, of course, we have the issue that the third runway will produce as much emissions as Kenya”. That is interesting. When we talk about other people having to cut back, we are talking about economic growth at the same time. I raised the matter in a debate the other day. Perhaps we should have far fewer flights; perhaps we should cut the numbers of flights. Is it really acceptable for the cheap-flight syndrome to carry on? We are building for capacity for 2030, when we might not even have the oil to put the aircraft in the air, let alone to power a massive growth in aviation. If we believe in climate change, should we not look at reducing the amount of air capacity, because it might never exist?
I have significant worries about the European trading scheme. I hope that it works, but I hope also that we do not go down the route of using it as an opt-out clause, because, with 27 member states each fighting for their own interests, the market may be flooded with carbon units. They will be bought and carbon levels will not be reduced.
I shall not go into waste, because it has been covered comprehensively, but, as many noble Lords have said, climate change affects many different areas. The noble Baroness, Lady Byford, spoke about agriculture and tillage. I am working with a company on a one-pass seed drill which would massively reduce the amount of fuel used by farmers by removing the need to turn over the soil five times. We perhaps have to start looking at such schemes and moving towards changing the way we do things. As the noble Baroness, Lady Young, eloquently pointed out, things are changing. She had quite a difficult summer at the Environment Agency with the flooding. Being on the front line has changed the public’s perception.
I ask the Minister to think about supporting any schemes which deal with carbon labelling on the local level. We have a problem in that regard. It has come up again and again. On the radio, when people talk about cutting emissions, many people talk about electricity as the only form of carbon emission. One problem is that electricity emission represents only about 30 per cent of emissions; the other 70 per cent comes from all other sectors. We can be very keen on introducing nuclear power, which some of us oppose and some support, but in the great scheme of things we have to bring everything else in the round into the mix.
I studied as an archaeologist at university, which is not the most useful of degrees—or at least it does not help you often in everyday life. However, the one area on which I was very keen was prehistory. Of course, the best finds in prehistory were not in Britain; the best finds were in the lowlands, and 16,000 years ago the lowlands of Europe were underneath the North Sea and the channel. Recent evidence tells us that the glaciers that disappeared 16,000 years ago disappeared not in the course of centuries—scientists have thought that the ice age ended over centuries—but probably in
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8.31 pm
Earl Cathcart: My Lords, I am delighted to be speaking at the end of such an interesting debate. Climate change is high on the political agenda on all sides of this House. We all support the introduction of this Bill and the recognition or consensus, as the Minister said, that Britain and the world in general must reduce carbon emissions, and quickly. We on these Benches warmly support the Bill. However, the devil is in the detail and, as we have heard in today’s debate, there are many variations on how to fine-tune that detail.
Many of today’s speeches have discussed areas that I was going to touch on, while some noble Lords have brought up other points. In particular, the noble Lord, Lord Waldegrave, argued that the Committee on Climate Change should have a duty to educate the public and should have a more proactive role in adaptation. The noble Baroness, Lady Young, too, argued that it should have a more proactive role in that regard and should tackle the matter urgently. The noble Baroness, Lady Byford, drew attention to the effects of the Bill on farming and the complementary nature of this Bill with the Energy Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, and the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, both said that the penalties against the Secretary of State would be unenforceable, as did the noble Lord, Lord Vinson, who went on to talk of the need for energy security and for more new nuclear power. I agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, when he questioned our transport policies and priorities and urged us to find alternatives to fossil fuels. My noble friend Lord Dixon-Smith gave us an indication of how modern technologies and energy sources can reduce carbon emissions. I found myself agreeing with the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, on Greenpeace being a check and a balance. One might not like what some of the pressure groups say, but they make us stop and think.
Part 1 deals with carbon targets and budgeting. The Bill currently has a 60 per cent target for reductions by 2050 and there seems to be an almost universal agreement that that is not enough. Can the Minister confirm that the Government think that a higher target is necessary? I think that he mentioned 80 per cent in his opening remarks. Does he agree that the Committee on Climate Change should set these targets, which would then be subject to parliamentary approval, and therefore that no CO2 target should appear in the Bill? That would certainly allow for a more robust and realistic target to be set, because it would be based on scientific evidence.
Before I leave the subject of carbon targets, I should mention the interim target of between 26 and 32 per cent by 2020. This was touched on by the noble Lord, Lord Jay. It seems odd that Clause 5 says that the upper limit must be no more than 32 per cent.
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The Bill proposes five-year carbon budgets, the first one applying to 2008 to 2012, as well as yearly reporting to Parliament on progress. Given that there will be a general election in the middle of the first five-year carbon budget period, there is an argument that there should be rolling annual targets so that Parliament can assess the success or failure of the Government of the day’s achievement. If the budgets are to work, those working towards the targets are the ones who should be held accountable. We surely want to avoid giving a Government of any colour the chance to simply blame someone else. Progress should always be the priority.
The committee—or, as my noble friend Lord Taylor preferred, the commission—is due to report on the first five-year budget by September 2008, which is only nine months away. It is therefore imperative that the Government set up the committee now rather than waiting until this Bill becomes law. Can the Minister say when he intends to set up the committee?
The committee has an advisory role only and, as my noble friend Lord Taylor said, we feel that a commission, replacing the committee in the Bill as it stands, should be a completely independent body with responsibility for overseeing the entire programme and for scrutinising and holding key players to account, including the Government of the day.
The Government took a similar “advice only” position in last month’s debate on radioactive waste management. In that debate, the Minister rejected giving the committee full responsibility. He said:
“The Government will set the policy and take final decisions”.—[Official Report, 29/10/07; col. 1240.]
When asked what weight would be given to recommendations from the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management, the response was—I hasten to add that I do not think that it was from the noble Lord, Lord Rooker—that it would depend on the advice received. I think that this is a great pity. Governments will come and go. There is a pressing need here for continuity and a commission on climate change would give that necessary continuity. The “advice only” stance by the Government gives the Government of the day wriggle room and the ability to make decisions that prioritise political expediency over the interest of the public—and the planet.
These Benches believe that giving a commission full responsibility for overseeing this entire programme would give far greater credibility in the eyes of the public, industry and the three devolved Administrations, by which I mean Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. I know that the Minister has already been in discussions with them on the Climate Change Bill and my understanding is that they are all supportive of the Bill. However, this is an area that needs greater thought, because it is conceivable that, when the Secretary of State sets the five-year carbon budgets, the devolved Administrations could set different ones and, indeed, different secondary legislation. That is yet another
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Why is Defra in charge of this? The obvious answer is, “Because it’s the environment, stupid”. Yes, it is the environment, but let us look at it. Since 2005, Defra has had three Secretaries of State; to me that lacks continuity. If in future Defra is confronted with another annus horribilis like 2007, with inland floods, tidal flooding, bluetongue, foot and mouth, bird flu and so on, one can hardly expect the Secretary of State to have his eye on the ball as far as climate change is concerned.
Although the Climate Change Bill will affect Defra, it will also impact on many other government departments, as my noble friend Lord Crickhowell argued. It will affect the Treasury; the Foreign Office; the Department for International Development; the Minister for Europe; DBERR, the former DTI; the Department for Transport; the Department for Communities and Local Government —housing, planning, schools and hospitals—Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and the nine English regional ministries. So I ask again, “Should Defra be in charge?”. Maybe that is not such a stupid question. We on these Benches think that this should be strengthened further by making it the responsibility of the Prime Minister, who is the one person with the necessary clout and authority to take legal responsibility for compliance with this and subsequent regulations.
I enjoyed the speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, on the moral argument and how it impacts on overseas carbon credits. Overseas carbon credits allow the UK to spend money abroad to help another country to reduce its CO2 emissions and they allow this country to count that expenditure as part of the UK target. It is rather like the buying of indulgences. Of course, there is a case for overseas offsets, which will help to fight global warming, but they will do nothing to change attitudes and outcomes here in Britain. While it is obviously worth while to contribute to the global battle against climate change, it is important that we work to ensure that the infrastructure for a new, greener economy is being developed here at home.
The noble Baroness, Lady Royall, assured me in response to a topical question about the forthcoming conference in Bali that the Government would provide in writing what percentage they were prepared to allow to be traded. As I have yet to receive an answer, I hope that the Minister will be able to provide a precise figure now. If not, will he explain how we are negotiating global provisions for carbon reductions without such a figure?
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