Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, that this is an important Bill, and it is to be welcomed is entirely self-evident and I am enormously encouraged by everything I have heard during the past hour of our debate. Just last week the Prime Minister said of the impact of climate change, "““it is not over-dramatic to say that the character and the course of the coming century will be set by how … we measure up to this challenge””." In response to last week’s rather sobering report from the United Nations Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, one of Germany’s leading environmental scientists was quoted in the New York Times as saying that: "““The world is already at or above the worst case scenarios in terms of emissions””." Three months prior to the Summer Recess, I enjoyed the privilege of chairing a committee of both Houses to scrutinise this Bill. I was fortunate in having alongside me a marvellously committed group of people, many of whom will make their voices and views known later in the debate. It is also worth reminding the House that two other expert parliamentary committees studied the Bill, and I think one would be hard-pressed to put even a cigarette paper between any of our key recommendations for improvement, many of which have, in fairness, already been taken on board. Being neither a scientist nor an economist, I shall focus my remarks on the moral and historical implications of the Bill, one which will unquestionably have an impact on our economy and our lives. More than anything else, this is a Bill about personal and collective responsibility. It is also about morality, a word that does not force its way into many of our debates, especially those involving ostensibly economic matters. In fact, it is the most vexed kind of moral issue precisely because it is also about economics. It is or should be requiring us to make moral decisions that are more likely than not to have a price tag attached to them, and in that respect it bears a quite uncanny resemblance to another piece of legislation which also addressed what was primarily a moral issue, but one which at the time appeared to have immense economic repercussions. It was a Bill, the 200th anniversary of which we unanimously celebrated earlier this year, which led to the abolition of the slave trade. So, 200 years apart, we find ourselves facing the same timeless question of whether we have a duty of care towards our fellow human beings: ““Are we our brother’s keeper?””. In both cases the same economic question arises: what is the true cost of the energy we use to drive our economy? Two hundred years ago, slavery was perhaps the primary source of energy, a cheap and apparently infinite generator of power, and regarded by many as the foundation stone of British commerce and prosperity. As with our energy industries today, slavery appeared to represent a large and vital component of the economy. At the time of its abolition, the slave trade and its associated activities were reckoned by those opposing the Bill to account, quite astonishingly, for well over a quarter of this nation’s GDP, a fact which helped to drive one of the central arguments deployed by the anti-abolitionists: that the overly hasty abolition of slavery could prove only ruinous to the nation’s economy. In exactly the same way, their counterparts of today—the dominant energy interests—argue that any overly hasty commitment to change will prove economically catastrophic. If change is necessary, they argue, let it be incremental, gradual, and it will all come out right in the end. But those same vested interests who argued that a speedy end to the slave trade would be ruinous were profoundly wrong. In fact they were doubly wrong. Far from proving damaging, the abolition of the slave trade allowed Britain to leap forward, as if a metaphorical ball and chain had been lifted from the economy. Slavery, far from being the foundation stone of prosperity, had in fact been a colossal impediment, a hindrance to the development of more efficient business formations, leading to the generation of many new forms of wealth and success. Not only had it been morally repugnant, it proved to have been economically illiterate. That misjudgment arose, as such misjudgments usually do, from an irrational fear of the unknown and, more significantly, from a refusal to recognise that the real cost of the slave trade was infinitely wider and deeper than anything that could be measured by the profits made by a few prosperous souls in Bristol and Liverpool. The true price, the human price, was ignored by the anti-abolitionists because it was not them, their friends or their communities that were paying; it was someone else, and that ““someone else”” did not have a vote. Is it not exactly the same today with the debate surrounding the use of fossil fuels? Those who refuse to acknowledge the mounting cost of climate change do so because they are not yet the ones who are paying the price. Of course climate change is likely to affect every one of us in the long run, but it is already having a devastating impact on some of the poorest and most vulnerable people on earth—in Bangladesh last week; in Mexico the week before; and in parts of Africa, almost every week of the year. Just as the real cost of slavery was displaced on those least able to pay, so the real cost of our profligate use of fossil fuels is displaced on those least able to absorb it—the poor, the already disadvantaged, those who do not have the power to affect change themselves or the power to vote for change in countries such as ours which, for all the rapid growth elsewhere in the world, are still the real wastrels of energy and resources. That is why, in welcoming this ambitious and forward-looking Bill, I am concerned that the Government should not dilute the apparent strength of their commitment by addressing issues such as the purchase of carbon credits or the introduction of verifiable sectorial targets in such a depressingly evasive way. In order to press my point, I shall dwell on carbon credits, an issue which is being represented as an economic argument but which reveals itself quite quickly to be also an issue of morality and leadership. The Bill considers what proportion of any reduction in carbon emissions to which the UK commits itself might be achieved by the purchase of credits in other countries. The Joint Committee considered this question at considerable length. Climate change is a global emergency demanding a global response. A carbon reduction is a carbon reduction wherever and however it is achieved, and there is a great deal to be said for using the resources and the technologies of a vast economy such as ours to help others to achieve change. But the burdens and the benefits also need to be shared. The Government argument—or, more precisely, the Treasury argument—is that there should be no limit to our ability to purchase carbon credits overseas in order, as the response to the Joint Committee’s report put it, "““to avoid making our target needlessly expensive””." I am forced on behalf of our committee to ask the Minister in his reply to spell out to the House exactly what that means. Does it suggest that we just carry on much as we are today, allowing the world’s poor to make whatever adjustments to their lifestyle as may be necessary to ensure that we are required to make no adjustment to our own? Is it really ““needlessly expensive”” for us to adapt the way we live to these new and difficult circumstances? Or is it just politically and socially inconvenient, when it would be cheaper and more convenient to persuade an Indian or a Kenyan or a Brazilian to take the hit? Not only is this avenue of argument morally questionable, it is also economically illiterate, even in the Government’s own terms. Are we to forego the multitude of blessings which the Prime Minister assured us last week will accrue to those who are environmentally responsible and thoroughly innovative? Can it be all that smart to promote new technologies and whole new ways of managing the economies and societies of other parts of the world while we continue to indulge ourselves in the same old ways? As I have said, the Bill is as ambitious as it is urgently necessary. That being the case, let us not cut the ground from under our own feet by setting tough-sounding targets, only to immediately start grubbing around for ways in which they can be evaded and avoided. In my judgment, to do so would be morally indefensible and economically unjustifiable. We are fortunate enough to find ourselves in a situation in which defensibly moral and business decisions can at last go hand in hand. Could we not just for once grab the opportunity and make the most of it? But we should be under no illusions. At the heart of the Bill lies a moral dilemma that has to be wrestled to the ground, and like most moral or ethical questions it comes down to a simple choice. Can we decide to be honest today—not just a little bit honest; not honest abroad but dishonest at home; not honest in willing the ends but dishonest in denying the means; but properly honest? We could for once trust the electorate with a full and frank confession of the need for radical change, and then offer the leadership and commitment to achieve it. Of course there will be a price to pay, I hope a modest one. Sir Nicholas Stern’s report a year ago gave us a pretty good idea of what that price could be. The unacceptable alternative is to shut our eyes and continue to protest either innocence or ignorance of the real cost of what we all sincerely thought of as progress throughout the whole of the 20th century. Should we choose to close our eyes, our children and our children’s children will pay a truly crippling price—a price that will make a mockery of the comforts and the pleasures of the civilised life that today we all take for granted—and they will justifiably curse us as a generation for having been dishonest and irresponsible on a scale that would make the behaviour of the most callous slave trader in the 18th century pale into insignificance. Should we fail to get to grips with this impending crisis, there will be no need to ask for whom the bell tolls. It will be tolling for every man, woman and child on this once quite beautiful planet.