Energy Bill

No, I cannot. I accept that that was a disaster, but compare it with the WHO's estimates of how many people die every year as a result of carbon being put into the atmosphere. I am not talking about climate change, but about respiratory diseases related to carbon. Three million people die from them every year, and colleagues in the House are telling me that it is green to oppose a technology that in 50 years has led to the deaths of fewer than 100 people? Are we instead to rely on an energy source that kills that many people every 20 minutes of every single day of the year? That is nonsense. All low-carbon technologies need to be put on the table. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Ynys Môn, I am also a firm supporter of renewables. Indeed, I would be mad not to be—London Array, the biggest wind farm currently planned, is to be constructed off my constituency. Conservative Members were saying that they opposed onshore wind farms and wanted them all to be offshore. I remind them that a Conservative council in Kent delayed the start of London Array's construction—by objecting not to the offshore wind farm, but to planning permission for the onshore substation for the wind farm. That is the extent of their opposition to any building of renewables plants. If we can go ahead with the development of London Array and of the Warwick Energy wind farm, the other field off my part of the coast, and have them constructed from the port of Ramsgate—if the manufacturing of the wind farms can be done in east Kent, as I think possible and economic—we can become a centre of expertise around the world for wind farm construction. We could help everywhere else in the country with the construction of wind farms; perhaps we could get a little close to hitting the 15 per cent. target that people speculate we will have to achieve in the short term. However, all that does not mean that we should overlook the benefits that nuclear energy can deliver. We should consider all the low-carbon technologies. Yes, we should also carry out the study into the Severn barrage but, I say to Members on both sides of the House who are obviously excited about its possibilities, let us wait and see the science and see what the environmental impact will be before we make our decision. Taking energy out of water changes the environment in the water. If one takes energy out of rough water, one gets smooth water; if one takes energy out of the tide, one gets flat water. The sediment in the water settles and the things that used to live in that ecosystem cannot live there any more. Recently developed new technologies can help with that, because they do not take out all the energy and can use different types of construction rather than the old barrage system that we used to talk about, and which, if the Liberal Democrats had had their way, we might have started to build 10 years ago. We have gone beyond that. Perhaps there are solutions to building the Severn barrage that will not have those environmental consequences, but we cannot rely on them and we have to wait for the science. In the meantime, we must plan an energy mix that guarantees our energy security into the future and ensures that we focus on the key enemy that we face today—carbon. Let me relay one further story. A few years ago, I had a conversation with a senior official from the Russian embassy. I said, ““What is your energy policy?”” He replied, ““Our energy policy is that we're going to produce our energy from nuclear power and hold on to the gas until we control it and control the price, and then we're going to sell it to you.””