Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London, whom subsequent generations will come to see as one of the most distinguished to hold his great office—and it is a distinguished line that he follows in. This debate, as the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, said, is an historic one. In discussing this matter, we are not really recognising the scale of what we are doing. If this Bill passes into law improved in various ways, as I hope that it will, nothing about the way in which we do things will ever be quite the same again in this country. The noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, referred to the abolition of slavery and I thought of the abolition of the corn laws. It is something that is going to run through generations and change our behaviour in myriad different ways, if we take it seriously. The consensus that we have today—the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, is not in his seat—will soon break up. I was once Chief Secretary of the Treasury, where I found that all my colleagues were in favour of cutting public expenditure in the generality but never in the particular. It will be much the same with carbon emissions; there will be many special cases. I passionately believe that there will be a place for civil nuclear power. The consensus will not be easily found on that matter, but we will need to do it—and there will be many other similar issues. I welcome the Bill and congratulate my old sparring partner the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, on the way in which he introduced it. I shall comment on two aspects. The committee or commission—I do not much mind what it is called—is absolutely crucial if the legislation is to work for the length of its time. It is of course right that the Secretary of State, accountable to Parliament and through Parliament to the people, retains the ultimate responsibility. If we do not have the democracy behind what we are doing, it cannot be done. Not everything can be devolved to an outside committee, but the committee will need to have great prestige, authority and independence. As my noble friend Lord Taylor said, it will need to contain scientists, and I see at least two in the noble Lords, Lord Rees and Lord Oxburgh, who would do extremely well, although they may not thank me for that recommendation. It will also need to contain economists and those who understand the social implications of what is happening. This is not just a scientific matter; nothing of this importance can be, although science is at the heart of it. If the carbon budgets are to have public acceptance in each period, the work that lies behind them must be of the highest quality and the committee will need to have figures of very significant stature on it. If it is to win that acceptance, as I hope it will—and if it does not, a large part of this Bill will be nugatory—it could have some other things added to it. Various suggestions have been made. The sort of role that we are looking for here is the role played by the Committee of Imperial Defence in the height of the empire or, in its narrower field, the Monetary Policy Committee. But it may have a much more fundamental and important role than either. Assuming success, the committee needs to be given three additional duties. First, if I heard the Minister right—and I apologise to him if I did not—I think he accepts that it should have the duty to advise the Secretary of State on the target for 2050, not only on the budgets necessary to reach that target. If it comes to believe that the target is wrong it cannot do its work unless it says so, and can recommend as much to the Secretary of State. The Minister is nodding, and I think that must be an improvement that it is necessary to make. Secondly, and perhaps more controversially, the committee should have a duty of public education. Throughout this long campaign, there will be, as there are now, passionate debates about many aspects. There will be disagreements, conspiracy theories and eloquent books—mostly written by my neighbour in Somerset, Mr Christopher Booker—and they will be worth reading and arguing with. But somebody needs to have the duty to analyse and present what is being said in such a way that the public has the ordinary language capacity to understand what the debate is about, or we will lose support. It will be no good—even my friends, the great scientists, are sometimes guilty of this—simply saying that everyone who disagrees is a little potty. That was the line taken by many of my noble friends in favour of the European Union. It did not entirely work to say that anyone who disagreed with them was just potty; it seemed to feed the counterargument in some way. There is a duty with regard to public education. Some of the powers are nearly there. Clause 30(1)(c) contains a duty to provide advice on climate change generally, and the committee is allowed to carry out research. An additional power to have a role in public education in this matter would be useful. The third duty that I would land on the committee relates to Part 4. Here I strongly agreed with what the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, said. This is a weak part of the Bill at the moment which needs strengthening. I happen to be on the pessimistic wing. Every Christmas for some reason my children give me a little book entitled Thoughts from Eeyore, so perhaps it is just my temperament that is pessimistic. None the less I think that there is a case for being pessimistic. If the floating ice goes and we lose that reflectivity—forget the ice on Greenland—we shall see things happen very much more quickly than the international consensus now suggests. Let us hope that it is not so. I am absolutely certain that whatever we do internationally, and if all the international efforts are successful, we will need a great deal of adaptation and we will need to start thinking about that, budgeting for it and persuading people about it right now. I am not quite a Lovelockian but I am on that wing. Noble Lords will remember that he is quite calm about the whole thing. He says that several hundred million people will survive all this. Mostly they will live in the Mendip Hills, as far as I understand him, which may become a little crowded. But, more seriously, if things get worse than we say, can this committee avoid getting involved in this area as well? I put it to the Minister that the committee should have a rather more proactive recommendation role in relation to adaptation, because it will be the source and base of authority which will help government and the people to understand that measures that are often inconvenient and costly are needed. I would even consider putting a duty on the committee to budget for adaptation, or to have an involvement in that process and have a duty so to be involved. I mentioned one of my distinguished friends in Somerset who thinks that all this is a scare. Let us hope that he is right. Would it not be wonderful if it all turned out to be nonsense and a miraculous feedback mechanism in the planet ate up all these greenhouse gases? We are talking about greenhouse gases—all the gases are listed in Clause 64—not just carbon dioxide. If it turned out that the planet had an astonishing capacity to deal with all this by itself, that would be wonderful. Is that a plausible way to go forward? No, it is not. Having undertaken an enormous experiment in climate chemistry for the last 150 years, we now have—as the right reverend Prelate, the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, and many others said—to start dealing with the consequences. The problem with scares and their rhetoric is that if you take action people say, ““That was just a scare””. Imagine that in 1925 or 1930 a more robust British Government had maintained our armaments somewhere nearer the colossal level of 1918, and that Hitler had therefore taken the view that it would be foolish to push west and had gone east only. Would it not now be a large part of the consensus that those people who said that Hitler was a dangerous fellow for us were just scaremongers? He would never have bothered us at all. If we act successfully, I suspect that the Minister and all of us will in due course be teased by people who will say, ““It was all a scare””. That will arise because we have taken the necessary action in time. That is where I end. This is an historic day on which this country is beginning to rearm itself for the defence of the planet. It will be a very long process but nothing could be more important than the Bill which the Minister put before us today.