Debate on the Address

My Lords, there are many things in the gracious Speech that the sole Green Party representative in Parliament might have chosen to speak on. For a time, I was tempted to speak on international affairs to protest against our illegal involvement in two wars and to point out that no one had ever dabbled in the affairs of Afghanistan or Mesopotamia with profit to anyone concerned. Not all that long ago, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association sent me to Tonga. I learned there that there is a lot to be said for a policy of no entanglements and dubbing one’s islands the Friendly Islands. Even two illegal wars are not the most important matters on our plate. Much the most important and dangerous problem is climate change. We very much welcome the forthright challenge of the Stern report, in which the risks of making only small cuts in our CO2 production are laid out in full, including the risk of an increasing likelihood of ““abrupt and major irreversible changes””. The major changes include the melting of the Greenland icecap and the resultant six-metre rise in the sea level that this implies, which will affect London, New York, Shanghai and Mumbai. While mentioning Mumbai, perhaps I may say that I have not heard a better maiden speech in my 37 years in your Lordships’ House than that of the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, who, I see, modestly left the Chamber the moment before I was able to pay him a compliment. For the UK to do its share to avoid such drastic consequences, annual reductions of 9 per cent are needed to cut CO2 production to 90 per cent of 1990 levels by 2030. That is the Green Party’s message. The modest 3 per cent cuts envisaged by the Climate Change Bill are simply not sufficient. Annual reductions in production of 9 per cent may sound ambitious but are not impossible, requiring only political will in the place of political rhetoric. The first necessary economic steps include putting an effective value on carbon emissions through a capped, tradable quota system. They include ending airport expansion and embarking on serious investment in energy efficiency and renewables. They include market mechanisms such as the feed-in tariff scheme deployed by Germany, Japan and Spain, which has resulted in Germany installing 56 per cent of the world’s solar panels. By paying households to generate clean, green electricity, such feed-in tariff schemes can be used to shift our electricity production by making investment in renewables cost-effective for the individual. And let no one sneer at the efforts made by Mr Cameron. These are early days in exploring the way forward, and Mr Cameron is at least trying. We also need to take responsibility for all the carbon production in the whole of our economy. After the demise of much of British manufacturing and the coal industry, it should come as no shock to noble Lords to learn, carbon emissions in Britain briefly dipped in the early 1990s. But, in truth, those now rising levels of CO2 emissions are an underestimate of what our economic activity produces, for we are now exporting CO2 production to China and other countries. Products manufactured abroad use carbon in production and transit. The production is counted in the carbon figures where it is produced and the transportation, under the Kyoto protocol, is not considered at all. If we took those factors into account, our society would be seen to produce around 20 per cent more carbon emissions. The most obvious and significant conclusion is that if we were to meet our needs for food, clothing and household goods from local, sustainable production, we could drastically reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The Green Party advocates a system of strengthened local economies where we have a role as producers as well as consumers, thus not only reducing our impact on climate change but reinforcing our identity and self-esteem within local communities. Trade should return to its right role as the exchange of goods we cannot produce within our own economies. This seems far from the thrust of current economic thinking on any of the Front Benches, which ought to be a source of deep concern to us all. Instead, we continue to hear from them about competitiveness in a globalised economy which provides ever cheaper goods, manufactured abroad for consumption in countries such as ours. Such a view is fundamentally incompatible with serious and sufficient action on climate change. Without addressing these fundamental measures, the Government and the Opposition continue to be insufficiently ambitious and wrongly focused for the sake of supposed economic stability, thereby risking catastrophic climate events. The Green Party, however, believes that we must begin to localise our economies into more efficient and sustainable units to guarantee the future of our planet and economy. Such a vision offers greater community and personal satisfaction—a world where conviviality replaces consumption, where local identity replaces global trade and where community spirit replaces brand loyalty.