Climate Change

I am pleased to make it clear that we are calling for the Government to set a more ambitious target. I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman for his recent pamphlet, in which he clearly set out some of the muddle into which the Government have got themselves on such matters. It makes a useful contribution to the debate. The second part of the motion calls on the Government to set out an annual action plan to reduce our own carbon emissions in line with our target. If we are to persuade the developing countries to follow suit, there has to be a far greater sense of urgency about our own efforts in the developed world. That is a moral imperative, given that we rich countries may be responsible for some 70 per cent. of all the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. There is also a strong case for urgent action because of the danger that, if we do not act quickly, the costs of climate change will not mount steadily, but will tip over into highly dangerous areas. Feedback effects such as the melting permafrost on northern peatlands could release large amounts of methane; drying weather could lead to accelerated dieback of tropical rainforest; glacier melt could accelerate due to under-ice streams; and the vanishing of snow and ice cover could curb the albedo effect reflecting warmth away from earth. An annual action plan should be linked to far greater co-ordination of the Government’s efforts, as the third part of the motion suggests, through a dedicated Cabinet Committee on climate change. No amount of Whitehall reorganisation can bring all the public activities that affect climate change into one Department—nor should it. The Foreign Office is responsible for climate change negotiations; the Department for International Development needs to reflect in our aid policy the challenge of climate change for the poorest countries; the Department for Communities and Local Government sets building regulations, including those on thermal efficiency; the Department of Trade and Industry runs energy policy and therefore policy on electricity generation; the Department for Transport sets airport and aviation policy; the Treasury controls the taxes that are such an important influence on decision making on fossil fuels and carbon emissions; and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is responsible for the energy efficiency of existing housing stock, not to mention the methane output of our livestock. The potential for a good old-fashioned Whitehall shambles is well established. The Prime Minister has repeatedly told us that climate change is one of the greatest policy challenges of our time and we know that one of its principal effects is rising sea levels and worsening storms, yet last summer DEFRA cut the Environment Agency’s flood defence budget. Meanwhile, the Department for Communities and Local Government is still planning more than 100,000 new homes on flood plains and the Department for Transport is planning an airport expansion that is wholly inconsistent with the need to control aviation emissions. Because the Chancellor was spooked by the fuel duty protestors, the Treasury has steadily cut green taxes as a share of GDP from 3.6 per cent. in 1999 to 2.9 per cent. in 2005. The Department of Trade and Industry was responsible for research cuts at the centres for ecology and hydrology that helped us to understand how flora and fauna would react to climate change. Even more bizarrely, there were cuts in the research budget of the Hadley centre at the Met Office, which had established itself as one of the leading world centres for the study of climate change. The truth is that the Government do not have a well co-ordinated policy on climate change. As in many other areas, they have elevated spin above substance. They have merely a public relations campaign masquerading as a climate change policy. That is why we make the proposal in the motion for some mechanisms within Whitehall to ensure a semblance of joined-up government around an annual action plan that would help to deliver real policies, not just rhetoric. The most urgent priority is surely to tackle the transport sector, where our emissions have grown most rapidly since the Kyoto base year of 1990. We need a more steeply graduated vehicle excise duty that will shift most car buyers to low-emission models.