Climate Change Bill [HL]

This has been an excellent, and long, debate. The best comment was that of the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, who charged me with talking about the problem but not coming up with a solution. I thought, ““That is the best description of the Climate Change Bill as a whole; it describes the problem but does not come up with the solutions””. We all accept that because that is around policies that flow from the obligation to get to percentage changes. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, and to the Minister, that we have to be a little careful about getting too tied up with the fact that no one here has come up with a formula. We could all do that, and I expect that many of us here could come up with quite a reasonable formula. Even the Committee on Climate Change, if it pontificates for five years, or the international organisations, will come up with solutions none of which will be perfect and none of which will perfectly describe the equitable distribution of the emissions between nation states; because there is not a perfect solution or formula. What concerns me and many noble Lords is that if we attempt for too long to find a perfect formula we will get nowhere. There is also confusion, which we had earlier in debates on the Bill, about emissions trading systems and actually doing the accounts and the budgeting on emissions. They are importantly related things, but they are not the same. I welcome entirely that the EU ETS will take account of international aviation emissions in 2012, subject to all sorts of threats of litigation from the United States. That is a trading scheme. I take the Minister’s point that it would always be better if how we measure those allocations for that purpose was the same as how we measured it for the purposes of this Bill and accounting, but the amendment is about accounting and budgeting; it is not about trading. The two are separate. I would love the definitions to be the same, and I think that is a serious question.