Previous Section | Back to Table of Contents | Lords Hansard Home Page |
I will give another example, which is drawn from Heathrow. I visited the new scheme that will serve Terminal 5, initially from the business car park, but will spread wider in November this year. What happens at many airports around the world is that people park their cars, go to a bus shelter and wait for a bus, which is very often empty. It trundles around and around all the time, picking up a few people and taking them to the terminal. On the new system which is already functioning at Terminal 5, you go to a very modern-looking bus station, you press a button, a small vehicle without a driver approaches you, it takes up to six people and suitcases and so on, you step inside, you press a button and the vehicle takes you to the terminal. Work is under way on a model which, in a few years, will allow you to insert your flight ticket, and then take you to wherever you need to go for your flight.
That sort of clever technologydriven by a professor from Bristol who set up a companyis interesting local authorities. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, with his knowledge of local government may be interested in looking at that and perhaps trying to persuade some local authorities to take a risk on this technology. I gather that one local authority in the Midlands is interested, because if you can personalise your transport in that way, you reduce the need for large numbers of vehicles trundling around semi-empty. It is that sort of clever, long-term technology that we need to develop to deal with the crisis.
There is no simple solution and there certainly is no quick one, but it is a manageable problem, as long as we combine the science and technology with the necessary social changes. The Governments role is to do what they are doing rather well by trying to drive the science and technology forward and, at the same time, raising peoples awareness of what they can do in their personal lives. That is a core message for dealing with this problem. I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, for bringing it to the attention of the House.
Baroness Flather: My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, for initiating this debate, but, even more, for inviting me to speak. He knows what my passion is, and he still invited me. I thank him for that. I am very pleased that not only he, but the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Liverpool, touched on the population issue. I had the privilege of hearing the right reverend Prelate give a lecture at St Georges House on this very issuenot on population, but on climate change and so on. It was an extremely good lecture and I, too, thank him for speaking today.
Nice things have been said about India, and as I am Indian, I have appreciated them. But I remind the noble Lords who have said nice things about India that it has more malnourished people than any other part of the world. Let us not get carried away by the progress and the things that we see happening, including the increase in business and in Indias capacity to buy companies abroad and so on, because the poorest people have not been touched. In fact, if anything, they have become poorer. As I have always said, the poorest of the poor are women. Women in the Indian subcontinent and Africa are the poorest; their lives are not much different to those of slaves. They are very disposable, too; if a woman dies or becomes sick, it does not matteryou get another one. So I will speak more about that issue, because it is very much connected with population.
I remind the noble Lord, Lord Soley, that he chaired a committee which produced a report on the role of intergovernmental organisations. It stated very clearly that population increase was one of the major reasons for a rise in the prevalence of some devastating diseases, such as HIV, TB and malaria, and the possibility of an influenza pandemic. We should bear in mind that that increase is connected not only to climate change and greenhouse gases but to the devastation, to which my noble friend Lord Tanlaw referred, caused by burning whatever is available in order to cook food. The noble Lord, Lord Browne, when chairman of BP, arranged for some scientists to produce a cooking stove that would take any kind of material. It was sold, at a very low price, to women in India because, like me, the noble Lord believed that charity does not work. You have to make people give something for something. When you give something for an item, you use it; otherwise, you get it but do not use it. I am concerned that I have not heard what happened to that stove. We need far more of that type of thing in developing countries to help women, in particular, to save the environment.
Women are in many ways the key players in this matter in poor countries. They are closest to the environment, they carry the water and they rear the children. We also have to recognise how many women die in childbirth: one every minute. Also, 6 million children die every year from malnutrition, yet population has not become a major issue in discussions around the globe. We marvel at the progress that China has made and how it has changed, but do noble Lords believe that China could have done that without its one-child policy? I do not. Some 400 million children have not been born in China as a result of that policy. Maos attitude to population was that Chinas strength lay in people. Six, seven or eight children were being born in each family. If China had not taken that drastic step, it would not have made such big leaps so quickly.
The two other areas where large population increases are possible are Africa and the subcontinent of India. The noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, referred to aiming for a negative target by 2050, when there will be more than 8 billion people on this planet. One hundred years earlier, in 1950, there were 2.6 billion people. If we just keep that figure in mind, it will remind us of the extent to which climate change is caused by the number of people on the planet, yet that argument is not brought forward as a central issue. I realise that not every country has a dictatorship in the way that China has, and not every country can say, You will not have any children. There are numerous countries in Africa, where the population is likely to increase by 1.3 billion by 2050the largest increase in the world. The people there are already malnourished and the children are already dying of hunger. When the population reaches that figure, how many more people, including children and mothers, will die?
It is all very well for me to spell out all the negatives to noble Lords, but I do so because they are not becoming central points for people to think and talk about. I know that a great deal of our aid goes towards family planning but, overall, the amount given for family planning through aid agencies has reduced. It is most appalling that it is reducing and not increasing.
I have to say a word about the Catholic Church. It is doing something which should be considered a breach of all our human rightsparticularly of womens human rights. I should very much like someone to tell me exactly where the Bible says that you cannot use any kind of family planning. I have not found it but I would like to know how and where this notion started.
When the churches came into existence, there were very few people. Muslims are quite open about having large families: they do so because they want more Muslims in the world. However, if that is also Catholic ideology, the Catholic Church should tell us. It should say that it wants Catholics to have more children because it wants more Catholics. However, it does not say that; it just says that family planning is a sin. That is a terrible problem for women, in particular, who are concerned about their faith, and it also has an impact in places where there are not just Catholics but where much of the education and welfare is carried out through Catholic churches and sits alongside the anti-family planning dogma. I repeat that I find that very worrying.
I should like to touch on the millennium development goals, which were signed up to by 189 countries in 2000. We are now nine years on and the goals are supposed to be met by 2015. I do not know whoever thought for a moment that they could be met, or even that we could have made a move towards them, by then. We have not moved towards achieving any of the millennium development goals. The only figure that I have been able to find is that 4 million children have received primary education. That has happened in nine years but there must already be an extra 4 million children by now. Therefore, we will always be chasing our tails if we do not do something about population.
One of the goals is about hunger and poverty, which concerns agriculture. Eighty per cent of the agriculture in Africa is looked after by women, who do not receive any payment or economic reward for it. It is agriculture carried out at subsistence level. If we started to work with those women and got co-operatives going, they could feed half of Africas population, but we do not do that.
As my time is running out, I turn to my final point. Having painted this dire picture, I want to put forward a solution. If we help poor women in Africa and the subcontinent to earn a small amount of moneyto become employees and not just work from morning till night for nothingthey will change and begin to feel that they are worth something. They will look after their health and send their children to school. They will not drink or gamble and nor will they collect men off the streets. This is where the answer lies: we should concentrate on helping poor women to earn money.
We have been talking about education, but education cannot come to them. That is not possible; it is a pipe dream. Children can be educated but, at that stage of their lives, mothers cannot. If we help mothers to earn money, they will educate their children and they will also start to think about family planning. This is the only solution for our planetto try to halt the huge increase in population. We should work with the women and help them to earn money. All businesses should start to think of employing at least a few women. Only in India and Africa are poor women not in the workforce, whereas in Burma and elsewhere, they are. In Burma, of course, it is a different story, but all the other countries have improved their economies and their earning capacity by having women in the workforce. It is not a western idea.
Baroness Maddock: My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, for bringing forward this important debate about carbon dioxide emission targets. I shall declare two interests before I start. I am president of the Micropower Council and a non-executive director of a heating company that specialises in combined heat and power, district heating and geothermal energy.
It is clear that there is quite a lot of agreement in the House on this issue, with the exception of the noble Lords, Lord Reay and Lord Tanlaw. We have had a wide-ranging debate and a particularly interesting contribution from the noble Baroness, Lady Flather, who has just spoken. There is also agreement that if
21 May 2009 : Column 1458
It is disappointing that over recent years, although we talk and agree a lot about things, the progress we have made towards our ambitions has been a little slow. Carbon dioxide emissions in the United Kingdom have risen 4 per cent since 1999 and 1 per cent in the past year alone. The Government have said that that makes it difficult for them to reach their domestic target of 20 per cent reduction in carbon dioxide by 2010. The other disappointing thing is that although we have green taxes, the take from them is falling. It was 3.6 per cent of our gross domestic product in 1999 but in 2006 it was only 2.7 per cent. Energy consumption has gone up by more than 3 per cent since 1997 and the most disturbing bit is the 11 per cent increase in electricity consumption. Although we have made progress on renewable resourceswe can argue about which ones are effective and so onthe UKs domestic electricity target of 4.6 per cent from renewables is some way off the 10 per cent for 2010.
I shall touch on aviation, with which the noble Lord, Lord Soley, is familiar. Of course, there has been a 61 per cent increase in air passengers since 1997 and aircraft emissions are up 23 per cent. I agree with the noble Lord that we need to be careful about how we talk about this because it is not straightforward, as his example showed. The other big transport issues are cars and the traffic on our roads, which is up 12 per cent since 1997. We are all very good at setting targets. I put myself into that category, too, in the work that I have done in this area over the years. As I am speaking from the Liberal Democrat Front Bench, I will be a bit politicalI know that the noble Lord, Lord Bhattacharyya, said that he was not going to be political on thisbut I will talk about what we believe. We could reach 100 per cent reduction in our CO2 emissions by 2050 and we have put forward a comprehensive range of policies based on evidence that we have taken relating to climate change mitigation and adoption within the United Kingdom as well as in the international arena.
We see a zero-carbon Britain that will be energy independent and that does not overly rely on foreign sources. Action at EU level, such as the European supergrid, will be very important in breaking our current dependence on fossil fuels imported from Russia and the Middle East. We believe that the EU Emissions Trading Scheme has the potential to be a major lever for promoting low-carbon technology. Lots of people have talked about how we need to change what we are doing and change behaviour, but we need to ensure that the price of the carbon is appropriate.
I want to touch on five key areas that we have looked atthere are a lot more. The first is a commitment to 100 per cent carbon-free, non-nuclear electricity by 2050. If we are to do that we need to provide incentives for people to use renewable energy, microgeneration,
21 May 2009 : Column 1459
It would be a national scheme, enabling householders to apply for funding to insulate their homes and to finance microgeneration renewable energy, and at the same time avoid large upfront costs. The cost of the work would be in the form of a loan, repaid over a period agreed by the householder paying the repayments through their energy bills. When I got married in the 1960s, I paid off my cooker and fridge on my energy bill, and I do not see why we cannot do that sort of thing to help people pay for the cost of refurbishment in their homes. It is important to tax the people who pollute and use the money to reduce income tax. I have already mentioned the EU ETS and we want to see the permits being auctioned, as we would get a better price for carbon in that way.
I shall now spend a little time talking about the energy efficiency of buildings, which is an area on which I have campaigned over the years. I lived in Stockholm in the late 1960s and early 1970s in a properly insulated flat. It was cheaper to heat than the box I had left behind in England, partly because it was so well insulated and partly because there was a decent and more efficient heating scheme in the area. I realised that they did not have excess winter deaths; there was no such thing as fuel poverty. It is a great disappointment to me that 40 years later we are still not building to those standards in this country. We are beginning to get towards it, but we still have not used combined heat and power and district heating in the same way as they have done in Scandinavia. None of this is new technology. It is all tried and tested, and it works.
In the other place I successfully piloted the Home Energy Conservation Act 1995with the help of a lot of other people, I have to saythrough Parliament. It was an enabling Bill to allow local authorities to gather statistics about how energy efficient the homes in their area were. The Government would then have those figures to target resources and local government could suggest ideas on how they thought they could be improved. Unfortunately, the Government did not run with it. They never used the Bill as they could have done to give them the information that they need, and now they want to repeal it, which is bitterly disappointing, although I do not think they have got that far yet.
The Government will say that we have the Climate Change Act, which is the most challenging legislation in any developed country. That is true and we are making progress, but it is regrettable that we have lost so much time. There has been too little finance and too many disparate schemes in recent years. There have been lots of good intentions but they are often not properly carried through.
Lastly, I shall touch on the Governments record in their own buildings, which the noble Lord, Lord Soley, referred to earlier.
Baroness Maddock: My Lords, I am not surprised that the Minister is a bit disappointed; it is very disappointing. One in three government buildings has the lowest possible rating for energy efficiency. I quote an article in the Observer, which states:
Overall, 98 buildings were rated G
which I think is the lowest score
Of course, none made the top score of A. What I found most extraordinary when reading the article was that the new Home Office building and the newly refurbished Treasury are only rated F; that is pretty near the bottom.
Noble Lords will see why I particularly liked this quote from Paul King of the UK Green Building Council, who said:
The only thing that sets the government buildings apart is that we actually know how bad they are because of this quirk of European policy that has required these energy certificates for public buildings. What we desperately need is similar information about the rest of the UK's buildings.
If they had used the Bill that I put through Parliament properly, they would have just that information.
In conclusion, we could find the finance to reach our 2050 CO2 targets. As other Members have said, it is challenging. We have the science and technology to do it, and we have a lot of will. We have lots of legislation, both UK and European, to help us to do it. I hope that the Minister can indicate that we will have a bit of a step change in the rate at which we try to tackle the issues that we have been debating today. That is not only because many of us care about the planet and the well-being of the human race, but because we have a golden opportunity in the recession. We can create lots of green jobs that will help people in the difficult times of the credit crunch and so on.
What I really want to say today, with which I am sure many in the Chamber will agreenot everybody, of courseis that we need to get on and do more. We need to do it better and, above all, we need to do it faster.
Earl Cathcart: My Lords, many interesting and valuable points have been raised throughout this debate and I am pleased to see that climate change is getting the full attention it deserves. As others have done, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Dixon-Smith on giving us the opportunity to debate how society needs to change to meet the 2050 CO2 emissions target. His remarks have been thought-provoking and it will be interesting to hear how the Minister will respond to them.
My noble friend mentioned a particularly sobering fact: in order to reduce the UKs CO2 emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, we need to get back to levels of emissions that existed in 1850 when our population
21 May 2009 : Column 1461
The basis of this debate was to ascertain how society can best meet the 80 per cent greenhouse gas reduction target set by the Climate Change Act. The target was based on the advice of the Committee on Climate Change, which, as we know, was established under the Act as an independent advisory body to the Government on such issues as climate science, low- carbon technologies and energy security. While the committee is required to make recommendations to the Government, it is not its role to implement or propose mechanisms through which such targets can be achieved. It is now down to the Government to put in place the policies that will enable the aspirations of the Act to come true.
One thing is for certain: we must start decarbonising our economy now. There are three key issues we must work on. First and foremost, we must decarbonise our energy supplies. Secondly, we must make major improvements in domestic and commercial energy efficiency and, thirdly, we must decarbonise our transport system. These three priorities are not all we can do; they are the least we must do. Without delivery in these key areas, an 80 per cent reduction will be impossible.
There has been some interesting debate on how we can shift Britain away from our reliance on fossil fuels. I particularly liked the idea of the noble Lord, Lord Rees of Ludlow, of solar power from the Sahara, distributed via a pan-European grid. That alone could probably solve all our problems.
This is a serious challenge, but it is also a serious opportunity. It is possible to turn Britain into the world-leading economy for green innovation and technology. We have some of the best renewable resources in the world, such as wind, wave and tide. We have leading expertise in areas such as marine engineering and energy infrastructure. We are surrounded by shallow waters and are in close proximity to large energy markets, both at home and on the continent.
With all these benefits, the UK must recognise that this carbon reduction target is not a problem but an enormous opportunity. By tapping into these new, abundant low-carbon sources we will make our country more energy secure by providing our homes and businesses with power sourced close to home, not from places such as the Middle East or Russia. This will benefit our balance of payments and our security.
Reducing our carbon emissions will also create many new jobs and more wealth. We must realise that a green future means a jobs-rich future. It was announced a few days ago, as has already been mentioned, that the largest wind farm, the London array, will proceed
21 May 2009 : Column 1462
Next Section | Back to Table of Contents | Lords Hansard Home Page |