Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, I too welcome the Bill. I do not go so far as the noble Baroness, Lady Billingham, and say that this is a brave Bill; one of the NGOs described it as an Aero-like Bill, full of little bubbles and quite lightweight. However, the Government have been remarkably brave to introduce the Bill in this House because there has been great consensus that the Bill could be much better, and there has been a feeling among many of those who have spoken today that we will make it a lot better. I gently remind the Minister—who has been extremely industrious today, answering two Questions and attending this debate—that we might quietly move a number of the amendments to give the Bill some real teeth. The noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, said that there is a morality to moving forward on this issue. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London said that the Church of England sees it as a moral issue and as an organisation has tried to do as much as it can. I am very keen on some of the schemes that it has introduced throughout the country. If you talk to people around the country, you find that they also see this as a moral issue. It has been interesting today to see that no one in the debate has questioned whether climate change is taking place, which means we have moved on from a few years ago when I know at least a couple of Peers would have stood up and questioned it. It is more a question of the speed with which climate change is taking place and how quickly government should react. The major issue that will confront the Government—and as this is a Second Reading speech, we should highlight the issues over which they might face one or two difficulties—is the five-year target. Since people are talking about future technologies, I should say that over the weekend I was reading Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and there is a wonderful part where a spaceship is planted at Lord’s cricket ground but no one can see it because there is a technology called ““Somebody Else’s Problem”” and the ship is wrapped in a Somebody Else’s Problem field. I get the impression that the five-year target is based on that principle. I was always told that if anyone mentioned five years in parliamentary terms, that meant it was after the next election and therefore no one could seriously take it into account. I find that people who talk about climate change also focus on the issue of China and India, which has been mentioned today. There is a feeling that there is no point in us doing anything—it is someone else’s problem—because China and India are growing quite so rapidly. However, I find that argument quite distressing. The Government of China are desperately worried about climate change because the rice harvest might fail and then they would have real problems feeding their population. There is also the moral question of whether we should use that argument at all, because the majority of China’s population live on under £2 a day. We, as one of the richest nations on the planet, who profligately use far more carbon than anyone in the developing world, feel it somehow unfortunate that we are even asked to try to curb our excesses. As my noble friend Lady Northover has pointed out, it is the poor who will suffer hardest as the situation moves forward. I hope the Government will take on board that there is unhappiness with the five-year target. We think a three-year target would be slightly better, with annual indicators. The problem I have with targets is that they are very prone to slippage. There was an example last year, when there was a massive increase in the amount of carbon used in the country because the spot price on gas went up very quickly last winter. The problem there was that, instead of us paying higher energy prices, many mothballed coal-fired power stations were fired up again to meet the demand, which caused an incremental increase in the amount of carbon being produced into the atmosphere. If we used the trading scheme we could always say that we could counteract that by buying credits, but I feel there is a moral ambiguity about buying credits from overseas. Climate Change Capital has been mentioned today. I have had a meeting with that organisation—in fact, it seems to have affected many Peers in the building—and it has talked about some of the amazing things we can do. There are low-hanging fruit, such as reducing the amount of HFCs produced in China. That has an effect because of course carbon, like all greenhouse gases, knows no borders. However, as has been said, we should not try to export our problems. We should understand that, even though we talk about our carbon budget in this country, we have automatically exported a massive carbon burden by producing most of our goods in India and China. That is carbon for which we should be accountable. We are going down the route of a Secretary of State saying in 2050 that we have reduced our emissions by 60 per cent, but that Secretary of State may not yet even have been born. Saying to somebody who may not yet have been born that they will have to be responsible for slippages in the system is an issue. That is why the Bill is to a degree aspirational. That it is aspirational in that area is not a bad thing, but if a Secretary of State misses the target, what sanction will they face? Under European directives, the sanction is a fine for the country, but I cannot see that happening in a British scheme. We would like to see the Prime Minister, rather than the Secretary of State, made responsible for meeting the targets. On that, we share the view of the main opposition party and it will be interesting to see whether there is an amendment on it that we can both put forward. We hold that view because we have seen the first climate change casualty in the political sphere. There has been talk that the popularity of the Prime Minister of Australia was massively affected by his inability to agree on climate change. Although he changed his view towards the election, the electorate showed that it believed in climate change. Another country that has made massive changes is Canada. One warm winter last year which had amazing effects has moved climate change from the low to the high end of the list of political priorities. It is interesting that we as politicians are lagging behind the public, who believe that politicians should do a great deal more than they are doing at the moment. I therefore think that the Bill is momentous or historic only in one fact: that it will be the first of many. We will probably be considering a climate change Bill every couple of years as the science progresses and we understand more about the problems and issues that we have to address. It is interesting that the Bill’s Second Reading is in the same week as Heathrow’s next runway is being given the go-ahead. I heard somebody say on the radio this morning: ““Well, of course, we have the issue that the third runway will produce as much emissions as Kenya””. That is interesting. When we talk about other people having to cut back, we are talking about economic growth at the same time. I raised the matter in a debate the other day. Perhaps we should have far fewer flights; perhaps we should cut the numbers of flights. Is it really acceptable for the cheap-flight syndrome to carry on? We are building for capacity for 2030, when we might not even have the oil to put the aircraft in the air, let alone to power a massive growth in aviation. If we believe in climate change, should we not look at reducing the amount of air capacity, because it might never exist? I have significant worries about the European trading scheme. I hope that it works, but I hope also that we do not go down the route of using it as an opt-out clause, because, with 27 member states each fighting for their own interests, the market may be flooded with carbon units. They will be bought and carbon levels will not be reduced. I shall not go into waste, because it has been covered comprehensively, but, as many noble Lords have said, climate change affects many different areas. The noble Baroness, Lady Byford, spoke about agriculture and tillage. I am working with a company on a one-pass seed drill which would massively reduce the amount of fuel used by farmers by removing the need to turn over the soil five times. We perhaps have to start looking at such schemes and moving towards changing the way we do things. As the noble Baroness, Lady Young, eloquently pointed out, things are changing. She had quite a difficult summer at the Environment Agency with the flooding. Being on the front line has changed the public’s perception. I ask the Minister to think about supporting any schemes which deal with carbon labelling on the local level. We have a problem in that regard. It is something that has come up again and again. On the radio, when people talk about cutting emissions, many people talk about electricity as the only form of carbon emission. One problem is that electricity emission represents only about 30 per cent of emissions; the other 70 per cent comes from all other sectors. We can be very keen on introducing nuclear power, which some of us oppose and some support, but in the great scheme of things we have to bring everything else in the round into the mix. I studied as an archaeologist at university, which is not the most useful of degrees—or at least it does not help you often in everyday life. However, the one area on which I was very keen was prehistory. Of course, the best finds in prehistory were not in Britain; the best finds were in the lowlands, and 16,000 years ago the lowlands of Europe were underneath the North Sea and the channel. Recent evidence tells us that the glaciers that disappeared 16,000 years ago disappeared not in the course of centuries—scientists have thought that the ice age ended over centuries—but probably in decades, moving into maybe 100 or 200 years. The speed of that change must have been quite catastrophic. In this building, noble Lords only have to go on to the Terrace and look at where the high watermark is of the tide to realise that it is a tidal river and see how dangerous this is if we do not take it seriously.