Climate Change Bill [HL]

I support the amendment. I want to be clear about what it does. It does not stop carbon trading from happening during that period at all; we will come to how much that should or should not happen later in the Bill. The amendment says that by the time you get to 31 December 2050 you must not only admit your carbon budgets but have bitten the bullet as an economy and decarbonised yourself, so that in that last spilt second—as it could be under the amendment—you have reached a 60 per cent, or whatever, carbon reduction in the economy. You have not only gone through the carbon account process but have avoided hypocrisy, done the business and, at the end of the day, have actually delivered that percentage reduction yourself. The noble Lord, Lord Woolmer of Leeds, earlier raised whether that stops carbon trading. Of course it does not. I have gone through this several times in my own mind. It is a bit like measuring hospitals on outputs. You might measure surgeons’ success rates or turnover of hospital bed usage, but that does not mean that you stop the hospitals doing all the other things they must do. It is just that you measure particular things because that is what you are trying to do. While you might be moving towards an actual 60 or 80 per cent decarbonised economy, on the way you have the EU ETS for which I am a strong missionary. All that still goes on, because individual businesses are trading under a cap-and-trade system, so that cap is coming down. All the advantages that we know of in trading systems, such as exiting the most costly areas first and making the best, least cost, benefits first, still happens. All of that economy still goes on; the amendment does not preclude it. What the amendment does so well is say that, at the end of the day, the UK economy itself must be decarbonised. The trajectory of getting to that can happen through trading. Even between now and 2050, you can still have trading which counts towards targets. At the end of the process, however, you must get to that saving. That is why the amendment is particularly strong. I can see that I am losing the attention of the Committee, so I shall sit down.