Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, I congratulate the Government on the Bill, which is groundbreaking legislation. It is not yet perfect but it is an excellent start on a very tough problem. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, and the work of his Joint Committee, which seems to have made a number of excellent recommendations, most of which I support. Last Friday in Berlin, I attended a meeting of the IPCC. The message that came out of that meeting was that of urgency. We discover that everything we have shows that we have less time than we thought. That should be behind all our thinking and the way in which we approach these matters. I am sure that a great deal of attention will be paid in this debate to Clauses 1, 2 and 3, which contain very many important matters. I intend to address rather briefly two of the Cinderellas of the Bill—Parts 4 and 5—which deal with adaptation and the management of waste. The Minister went some way in his introduction to convincing me that a Prince Charming might be about to appear around the corner, but a Prince Charming is certainly needed. On adaptation, it is absolutely clear that even if we were to stop emitting greenhouse gases today, there would be 25 to 30 years of a progressively deteriorating climate before we began to see any change. This means that our current infrastructure must meet a variety of situations—storms, floods, landslides, heat-waves or what have you—for which it was not designed and to which it is not adapted. The trouble with infrastructure is that it changes very slowly and is rather expensive. At the moment, we have an infrastructure that is not fit for the coming purpose. Because infrastructure is so expensive, whether we are talking about roads, railways, river containment or what have you, it is not practicable to change everything at once. It is, however, practicable to change it at times of natural renewal or refurbishment. Will the Minister consider imposing an obligation on all bodies—not only regional ones—both private and public, down to local council level and up from there, to conduct a risk assessment? He may have included this in what he said. I do not think that he was absolutely specific. They could be required to produce a risk assessment and show how they intend taking it into account in their plans for refurbishment or replacement. Unless we make a move now, it will be either unaffordable or too late. This country has an abysmal record on the management of waste. Our grandchildren will read about the practices we follow today and have followed for decades with total astonishment. They will say, ““You thought you had problems with natural resources and energy, and you simply put that stuff into landfill””. They will not believe what we are doing on a daily basis. For example, a calculation done by someone I respect at the University of Texas looked at the intrinsic energy content of US urban garbage. The energy content is in all the organic material in garbage—for example, old shoes, tyres, grass cuttings, wood, furniture and what have you. The calculation was that the intrinsic energy content of the garbage thrown away in a year was about the same as the energy used by the current fleet of US surface vehicles, which is a very large number. In a sense, that is misleading because there is no way to recover all the energy in that garbage. I use this example simply to indicate that there is a lot of energy in our garbage, some of which we see as methane, which we simply abandon. We have to find different ways to manage this. Obviously, we recycle wherever we can, but after we have recycled what we can, there is a significant energy resource. I would expect large cities the size of London and Manchester to develop facilities by which they centrally manage their garbage. What cannot be recycled should be gasified—effectively heating organic material in a controlled environment to produce a synthetic gas, an important component of which is hydrogen—to produce liquid fuels or electric power. At the moment, this scarcely happens because our existing infrastructure has developed in a low-cost energy environment. But that environment has gone for ever and we need to look at these things very hard. In looking at the detail of the legislation on the management of waste, I hope that the Minister will take into account the fact that this is an important green energy resource. My final point relates to regulation. We are in a time of rapidly evolving technology. Quite often, the technology that we have is inappropriately managed within the existing regulatory framework. For example, not long ago I visited a power plant which generated electricity by burning waste straw. The company was close to bankruptcy because it had been obliged by existing legislation to put into its flue stack analytical instruments capable of measuring components that were not present in the straw. It was because the only existing relevant regulation applied to coal. Of course, these elements were present in coal and the local inspectorate had no alternative but to apply totally absurd regulations. I should like the Minister to consider the ways in which absurdities like that can be managed. Perhaps there could be a committee to which there can be recourse if something patently silly is happening as an unintended consequence of existing legislation. That sort of thing will arise time and again as the technology evolves, and there will be not be time to return to Parliament and completely redraft the law. We need a system that can respond flexibly to new situations.