Climate Change Bill [HL]

I support the amendment tabled by my noble friends. It is not as though they plucked the 2 degrees out of the air. The Joint Committee received an immense amount of evidence from very eminent scientists about what the Bill should aim to do. I believe that their amendment results from that. It is not something that they have thought up for themselves. The part of the amendment that I particularly support concerns the fair and equitable concept. Although I hear what the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, says about leadership—the Government said a lot about the leadership role that the Bill plays—the Bill should, for the reasons laid out by the right reverend Prelate, be as much about cleaning up our own act and setting our own house in order as telling the rest of the world what to do. The amendment is particularly important because it would set the tone for the rest of the Bill. As we debate the level at which international credits should be set and what role the EU Emissions Trading Scheme should play we should keep very much in mind that individuals in this nation consume three, four or even six times as much as people not even in the poorest developing countries of the world but those on a middle income. We are really very greedy. We should make sure that we start to play a fair and equitable role and do not rely on some of the mechanisms that we could rely on, which would do very little. The amendment would establish a powerful context for that.