Climate Change Bill [HL]

I was going to generally support my noble friend’s amendment for two reasons, but I am bound to say that the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, has raised legitimate concerns about the wording which must be looked at carefully again before the next stage of the Bill. Without elaborating on ““the economy””, what he said about ““wealth”” raised a number of issues that need further consideration. I looked rather sympathetically at the amendment initially because of proposed new paragraph (b), for much the same reason expressed in an earlier amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, who referred to the Severn barrage. I was not present for that debate; I was in Moscow at the time with the sub-committee of this House, but I raised exactly those issues in the debate on the Queen’s Speech. It is a very good example of how, if we are going to go down this road, we have to look carefully at the consequences of biodiversity on ecological systems. Equally I am sympathetic to what my noble friend said about the wrong use of biofuels. There are a lot of extremely good examples showing the sensible use of biofuels, notably in Brazil where extraordinary progress has been made using sugar to almost eliminate the need for ordinary sources of motor fuels, and so on. We also see other cases where rain forests and so on are being destroyed. There is a lot in the amendment deserving support, and this is one of the many issues raised during today’s debate. Important questions have been raised, which we will need to consider carefully on Report. There are good things about the amendment that I wholly support, but one or two matters on the precise wording must be dealt with before we go much further.