Climate Change

I would like to do so, but I cannot, given the plethora of responses that I need to make to points raised in the debate. I do not believe that the hon. Gentleman was here for the entirety of it. The Environmental Audit Committee did this House a great service when it produced its report on the millennium ecosystems assessment. It highlighted the degradation of whole ecosystems. Throughout the entire history of life on our planet, species extinction has occurred at the rate of one every 1,000 years. That was until now. During the past few hundred years, the rate has accelerated to the extent that we lose one species each and every year. Fluctuations in climate that evolution could accommodate when they happened over millennia now happen so fast that species cannot adapt. The result is the loss of biodiversity and habitat that provide the very ecosystem services on which we as a species depend. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced in the Budget earlier this year a new fund worth £800 million over three years to support development and poverty reduction through environmental protection, and to help developing countries respond to climate change. The fund will be governed jointly by my Department and the Department for International Development. The first £50 million of the environmental transformation has been earmarked for a multilateral fund to reduce unsustainable deforestation in the Congo basin. The fund will not divert money away from our existing spending on overseas development. It is additional to current aid and will be used to fund development activities with local as well as global benefits. The proposed title of this debate was ““Action on Climate Change begins at Home””. Some Opposition Members have tried to present a false dichotomy between domestic policy and international action, but they have lacked either understanding or vision, or both. Some have made narrow party attacks, as cheap as they were wrong. In truth, we have but one, fragile home—this planet. The Government must act to ensure that four things are done domestically to tackle emissions. We must reduce demand for energy, improve efficiency, use lower-carbon technologies, and tackle non-energy emissions from waste, agriculture and land use. We are doing all that in statute, in the most detailed and comprehensive way ever attempted by any Government. The Climate Change Bill provides the framework, and is the start, rather than the end, of this Government’s ambitions. We will modify and improve the targets and methods as the science and the economics change. Internationally, we are working towards the Bali conference at the end of this year, at which the UN framework convention on climate change needs to begin negotiating the elements of a long-term framework after 2012. We are acutely aware that we must reach agreement by 2009, at the latest, if we are to avoid a gap between the first Kyoto period and the second. It was action by this Government in 2005 placing climate change at the centre of the G8 agenda at Gleneagles that broke through the stalemate that had developed around Kyoto. The G8 summit at Heiligendamm in June will continue the Gleneagles initiative by trying to secure a package of measures that could be used to achieve consensus at Bali. In Paris earlier this year, the intergovernmental panel on climate change established the scientific argument for anthropogenic climate change beyond doubt. Last week in Thailand scientists went further than ever before in quantifying the effects, and last year’s Stern report commissioned by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor set out the economic basis for action. At Bali, the UK would wish the UNFCCC to agree long-term stabilisation goals. In our view, that means securing a CO2 equivalent of no greater than 550 parts per million, and an average global temperature rise no greater than 2°. I turn now to some of the issues raised in the debate. The energy standards for new homes in England and Wales have been raised steadily, by about 40 per cent. from pre-2002 levels and by 70 per cent. from pre-1990 levels. A new home now uses about a quarter of the average energy for space heating. In December, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government announced the Government’s proposal for further improvements in 2010 and 2013, with the aim of reaching zero carbon by 2016. The new buildings will be energy efficient and highly insulated, drawing their energy from zero or low-carbon technologies and therefore producing no net carbon emissions from all energy use over the course of a year. The buildings will help to reduce carbon emissions as well as lowering fuel bills for households. That is a very ambitious goal, and the Government have taken several steps to help the industry prepare to deliver the transition. We have published the code for sustainable homes, which will assess new homes against a six-level star rating, giving homeowners better information about the sustainability of their homes. From April 2008, we are minded that all new homes should be required to have the mandatory code rating, indicating whether they have been assessed and their home’s performance against the code. In this year’s Budget, my right hon. Friend the Chancellor announced that from October this year all new homes that reach the zero-carbon level will be exempt from stamp duty up to a maximum of £15,000. The Government have set up a zero carbon 2016 task force and are also working with English Partnerships to deliver a carbon challenge, to encourage developers to raise design and construction standards to deliver high-quality zero and near-zero carbon communities that are both affordable and sustainable. We recognise that tackling new homes is only part of the picture. The Government also have an ambitious programme to improve the energy performance of existing homes. Building regulations apply to replacement boilers and windows. Around 70 per cent. of a home’s energy use is for heating and hot water, so the requirement for all replacement boilers to be the most efficient condensing type will have a huge impact as the stock is replaced. Under the energy efficiency commitment, energy suppliers are making substantial investment in consumers’ homes. We think that the current phase of the EEC will deliver more than £1 billion of investment, which will more than double under the EEC’s third phase that starts next year. The Warm Front programme targets the fuel poor, with more than £800 million being invested in the current spending period. The decent homes programme is also delivering real improvements in the energy standards of social housing. Energy companies will be required to give customers real-time energy displays on demand from January 2008, enabling consumers to have better information about their home’s electricity consumption. I want to pay tribute to the remarks made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Mr. Morley). His contribution was as informed and imaginative as we would expect, and it proposed real solutions to the problems that we face. Like him, I do not want the carbon tax on imports to ensure no free riders, but we are working to ensure the international consensus that we both desire and which will mean that such a tax would be unnecessary after 2012. However, it was characteristic of my right hon. Friend to raise such an interesting, imaginative and technical point. My right hon. Friend also talked about feed-in tariffs. He may know that energy suppliers are developing a scheme to reward household microgeneration better. The Government have said that they will impose such a scheme if they are not satisfied with the outcome of the development by suppliers. Feed-in tariffs are a recognised form of renewable support, but they represent an approach that is fundamentally different from the UK’s market-based renewables obligation. My hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West (Mrs. Hodgson) alluded to her early-day motion about outlawing incandescent light bulbs. I congratulate her on the success of her campaign, and even more I welcome her realism in warning about the effects of tackling climate change on the some of the poorest people in our society, and about the disproportionate amount of their resources that goes to heating and basic insulation. My hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Andrew Miller) rightly talked about climate change as a security issue. There will be significant impacts as a result of climate change, even if we take urgent action to mitigate the effects. That is why the Government are taking the lead in adaptation. The welfare, economic and environmental outcomes between now and the middle of the century will depend on our ability to adapt to the impact of climate change, as my hon. Friend suggested. The most significant phrase in the motion is"““offset by other tax cuts””." The hon. Member for Eastleigh has made it clear in his recent speeches what those other tax cuts would be and where they would occur: 2p off income tax and 2 million low earners out of tax altogether. To give that commitment there has to be an element of certainty. To achieve that certainty the green taxes have to keep rolling into the Exchequer. To keep the revenues rolling in people have to keep doing the polluting activity that generates the tax income. The perverse message put out by the Liberal Democrats is that their policy undermines itself: go green and force taxes up. Green taxes should be used to change public behaviour, not to provide alternative sources of core Government revenue. It is a fact that climate change is an international problem. It is a fact that 98 per cent. of emissions arise in the international community outside the UK. It seems pretty clear to all but a party of political dinosaurs that if we are to avoid the same fate as the dinosaurs we must focus on solutions that can be agreed by the international community, and not just on action in the domestic policy arena. That is why, alongside the UNFCCC and the Gleneagles dialogue, the Government have concluded in the past year bilateral partnerships with China on clean coal and with Brazil, Mozambique and South Africa on biofuels. We have agreed clean energy investment with India and co-operation with Norway on carbon capture and storage. Domestic policy initiatives give us the moral basis to provide strong international leadership but they address only a fraction of the 2 per cent. of global emissions produced by the UK. We are the generation of politicians to whom has fallen the greatest political and moral challenge since the abolition of slavery 200 years ago. I welcome that opportunity and acknowledge the deep responsibility it places on us all. Our responsibility is to work together, setting aside narrow party faction to ensure that the UK realises its domestic targets by 2020 and 2050. More than that, we have a responsibility to engage the world community, to make it seize the problem and to encourage, cajole, caution, facilitate and inspire all the nations that share our true and only home—this planet—to rise to the challenge together. Question put, That the original words stand part of the Question:— The House proceeded to a Division.