Climate Change Bill [HL]

I hesitate to join this discussion after so many contributions because virtually everything has been said and the logic is impeccable. I have one plea. We should not burden the Committee on Climate Change with this problem. We have heard enough now to be aware that the implications go far wider than its remit possibly could, although it will have a very powerful lever to use. As long as the matter of aviation in particular is excluded, the problems for the rest of the economy are commensurately greater. The real question behind this is whether technological change can see us through the rest of the issue. While one cannot be absolutely certain about anything looking this far ahead, it is almost certainly the case that it can. However, there is a further problem which it is worth introducing at this stage. Many people are inclined to believe that we can do so much by economising in energy. Two years ago, our Economic Affairs Committee produced a report on energy efficiency in the British economy. It contained a very interesting graph, which has stuck in my memory. For anyone who chooses to look it up, it is on page 27. The graph related the economic performance of our economy to the energy cost of a unit of output. Over the previous 30 years, we enormously improved our energy efficiency per unit of output. That trend will continue. But some economists have come up with a rather embarrassing economic theory, which suggests that as we develop more efficient ways of using energy, so we also develop new ways of using energy. The graph had one line indicating economic output rising and another indicating units of energy per unit of economic output falling. The third line on the graph showed actual energy usage. It showed that as we became more energy efficient, we used more energy because we thought of new ways of using the energy that we had saved. I throw that into the discussion not because it is particularly relevant to this item, although it seems to be the only place where I might get a change to raise it, but in order that we appreciate the depth of the technological change which is going to be required if we are to begin to have any hope of meeting the targets we are setting so blithely without thinking about the consequences, and the changes that will have to take place if we are to succeed.