Climate Change Bill [HL]

The point that the noble Lord has just made about the busiest shipping lanes in the world brings out the difficulty with which we are confronted. The question is: how much of that shipping has anything to do with this country? A great deal of it is pouring goods into the continental ports, and it is exactly that kind of problem of definition with which we are confronted in the Bill. I owe my noble friend on the Front Bench an apology for rising before he did when he has put his name to the amendment. I heard him press the case but, much as I should like to see a reference to aviation emissions in the Bill, I did not hear him explain how they will be defined and measured and therefore placed in budgets and targets. That is precisely why I suggested that there was a role for the Committee on Climate Change, which would be able to form judgments about the practicality of moving forward in this area. Simply passing these amendments would achieve very little because that would not produce a practical solution to the question of how to define the emissions and ensure that they are emissions and carbon contributions which relate to this country and for which we should be responsible. It would not provide an answer to how we avoid getting landed with burdens that should fall on other countries. Friends of the Earth produced the rather interesting example of Switzerland—a landlocked country, which receives goods that pass in ships and aircraft through our waters and airspace. How are we to deal with exactly that kind of international sharing problem? It is no good saying, ““Well, we’ll include them””. We are entitled to demand—and I think the Joint Committee demanded this—a system for reporting the measurable factors in the aviation field that can arise, even if at this stage we cannot include them in the budgets and targets. We should find a way of reporting the scale of the emissions so that, when we can move forward to agreed international ways of acting, we can move quickly to bring them into a practical solution. Therefore, my anxiety about my noble friend’s position is that he finishes up with a clause which demands something that is almost impossible to produce. I do not know who would say, ““These are the factors that can go into the budgets and truly represent what the British should be contributing””. That is why I think we need a system for looking at this matter and why we should press the Government and the Committee on Climate Change to address these issues urgently, even if we cannot find an immediate solution.