Climate Change Bill [HL]

I agree with a great deal of what the noble Lord has just said in moving his amendment. He said that these were very complicated issues, and indeed they are. In the Joint Committee, as he will well remember, we spent a great deal of time considering these matters. On the fact that no emissions are included in the carbon count from international aviation, the Joint Committee said: "““We consider this to be a serious weakness which, in view of the significant likely growth of such emissions, has the effect of reducing the credibility of the 60% carbon reduction target. Given the clear expectation of the Secretary of State that international aviation emissions could be included in the net UK carbon account once they are incorporated within the EU ETS, we expect the Government to take all necessary steps to ensure that this is achieved. The draft Bill should be amended in such a way that it requires both the Government and the Committee on Climate Change to include separately international aviation emissions within the scope of their monitoring and reporting, including projections of future emissions—in a manner similar to the parallel reporting we are recommending in relation to non-CO2 greenhouse gases””." We went on to make other parallel recommendations. The final one was that, "““the Government should make it a priority to address these issues, and both it and the Committee on Climate Change should include international shipping emissions within their annual projections and reporting processes””." In many ways I regret that I did not put down an amendment to this clause that would address more directly what needs to be done next. The noble Lord who moved the amendment has raised the issue, but he has not provided a solution to the complications that exist and there are profound disagreements, even within the Government, about the way in which this matter should be approached. The Joint Committee received evidence from the Department for Transport, for example, that it was impossible to base the scheme in the Bill on the design of the EU emissions trading arrangements and the inclusion of aviation from 2011, because that scheme is based on particular aviation companies rather than the national contribution, and that therefore we were mixing up two quite separately defined arrangements. The then Secretary of State for the Environment expressed himself strongly on the desirability of getting this matter covered and felt that it would be possible to base the arrangements on the EU Emissions Trading Scheme. There are other complications that I developed during our discussions in the committee about shipping. I spoke with experience of having been for a long time a director of a major port company in this country and a director of shipping companies. There are real problems with aviation that are quite separate from those of shipping. For example, even Friends of the Earth in its brief on this set of amendments recognised the difficulties of arriving at satisfactory definitions before we have international agreements on which we can base the definitions. For aviation and shipping we have to fall back perhaps on the bunker fuel definition, on which there is some internationally agreed understanding, but that does not satisfactorily deal with the whole issue. The then Secretary of State for the Environment stated his case by saying, ““I recognise the importance—after all, I have introduced this Bill, which gives me the powers to do something about it when I think that I am able to do that and to table regulations””. I suspect that that is exactly what the Minister will tell us later—that there are powers in this Bill to do something about it when we can think of a way of doing it in a satisfactory manner.