Climate Change Bill [HL]

The noble Lord, Lord Turner, pre-empted aspects of what I was about to say. The noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, is undoubtedly right that this is complex. He may well be right that, in the end, wherever the carbon cut occurs in the world is equal. However, there are a number of important political and technical issues that require us to take the principle of the amendment very seriously. If the outcome were, never mind the precise arithmetic of the 30 per cent, something like what the noble Lord, Lord Turner, said—that 90 per cent of our achievements as a result of following the precepts of the Bill were actually achieved overseas—that is not the Bill that we are selling to our own people and the rest of the world. If we were buying all the credits overseas, British citizens would be without the pressure on their way of live to adopt new technologies and new ways of doing things which keep us ahead of the game. It is complex, because three different elements are intertwined. They are interrelated but not the same: there is the issue of trading; of our domestic target, which is essentially what is in the Bill; and our Kyoto commitments and the supplemental mechanisms that are provided under Kyoto. They do not all end up with the same result. The latter two, in this context, can be seen as mechanisms for achieving the first, but they are not the same and they are not the same answer. One could adopt a figure along the lines of the amendment without at the same time inhibiting trading or any new post-Kyoto international agreement. The central theme of the Bill is that Britain is setting itself—its own industry and people—a target to make a significant contribution towards the problem of climate change. If we allow a situation under the Bill whereby our companies and institutions are buying those credits elsewhere, that central principle falls. The noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, may well be right: the exact figure and the way in which that is achieved may be best left to the advice of the climate change committee. The optimum figure will certainly change over time. Apart from anything else, if the whole economy is in the trading mechanism you cannot count these things twice; therefore you are at the end of the road. But at this stage of the Bill, whereas we may not actually agree on a percentage, the principle put to the climate change committee should be clear. There should be a limit on the degree to which we can meet said targets over the budget set out in the Bill by overseas credits, however we care to express that. Although we can all argue about the 30 per cent—we know that it will change over time and we accept that the climate change committee will make the recommendations—the principle raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, should be included in the Bill.