Climate Change Bill [HL]

My comments are in sympathy with those put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell. This is a very important issue of how far the UK relies on its own reductions in carbon emissions and how much on bought-in credits from overseas. Clearly, there is a balance to be struck. There is a strong case in theory for achieving carbon emissions at lowest cost, wherever that is possible across the world. There is also a good argument for carbon trading being a mechanism by which economic resources are transferred to developing countries that are themselves achieving carbon emissions cuts. On the other hand, it is clear that the primary focus of developed countries—and this is why the word ““supplemental”” was used in the Kyoto Protocol—must be on reducing their own carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions. That is vital for two reasons. First, it is only because we are driving down and are committed to driving down our own emissions that we will be the drivers of the new technologies that are then available to the rest of the world, be they new technologies in energy efficiency or renewable energy. The other is perhaps a more short-term thing, but at the moment we cannot be as sure as we should like to be about the robustness of some of the offsets that we can purchase from the other end of the world. Therefore, it is essential that the primary focus of the UK climate programme be on our own greenhouse gas emission cuts with only a supplemental role for bought-in credits. In that context, I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, is correct to say that the details of that require more thought and that that is something that the climate change committee should look at and develop recommendations on. The appropriate amount of a purchase from overseas will change over time; it may be appropriate for it to be somewhat bigger in the very short term—in the first budget or so—because it is difficult to turn the ship quickly, but it should reduce over time. In that respect, I admired the ability of the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, to construct between Amendments Nos. 25 and 27 something which many of us when we first looked at the paper thought must be contradictory but which is a clever mathematical way in which to achieve that tightening over time. However, I worry that, if we accept the amendments, we would inadvertently make them far too lax. For example, if we run the figures on Amendment No. 27, if the budget for 2020—the third of the first three carbon budgets—was at the lower end of the range suggested by the Bill at 26 per cent, so that the budget would be 74 per cent of the 1990 figure of 100 minus 26, the amount that we could buy in to achieve that would be 30 per cent of 74 per cent, which would be 22 per cent. In that case, we would have achieved 90 per cent of our reduction by a bought-in mechanism and, over 30 years, would hardly have cut our greenhouse gases at all. Therefore, the principle of the amendment is worth talking about, but the details have to be worked out by the committee. If one puts in place a set of figures without that detailed thought, there are two dangers. On the one hand, it is impossibly tight, but it also signals a willingness to buy in credits from overseas. That is what would be achieved by the 30 per cent figure proposed in Amendment No. 27.