Climate Change Bill [HL]

I hope my noble friend will stay to hear the response, because I want him to stay to withdraw his amendment as well. I hope he will tarry a little longer. We recognised that his amendment raised very broad issues. That is why I am expected to make a short contribution to this important amendment. He will appreciate that Clause 10 already requires a number of factors to be taken into account both by the Government in coming to any decision about carbon budgets and by the Committee on Climate Change in formulating its advice. The list of factors includes economic circumstances, in particular, the likely impact of the decision on the economy and the competitiveness of particular sectors of it. That is a recognition of the substance of the point made by my noble friend. This Bill has to be set in the context of a substantial impact on the economy. I am grateful to my noble friends Lord Puttnam and Lord Whitty who seized the opportunity to emphasise that these will, in due course, be epoch-making changes. They will be as great as those that have affected our society at any time in the past. However, we should not underestimate the ability of our nation or others to adapt to change. When great challenges are thrown down to societies, the adaptability of people to transform their lives quickly and adopt strategies that they would not have thought of a decade earlier is remarkable. It is forced on them by circumstance, but it is also a realisation that a larger objective needs to be attained. People respond to leadership in those terms and recognise when society is being challenged. We had instances during the two world wars of the last century, but we should not underestimate the convulsions that occurred in centuries prior to that. People then had to adjust to even more significant change because, having lived in static societies for almost the whole of their lives, they found themselves in societies subject to substantial convulsions. So people can and do adapt to change. However, I do not underestimate the level of change that is required by the challenge that faces us on global warming. But that is the whole raison d’etre of the Bill. I hear what the noble Earl, Lord Ferrers, said and was glad that he returned us to prose. There was no way that I could keep up with the noble Duke, the Duke of Montrose, with his poetic flights, although they were much appreciated. I am therefore very glad that the noble Earl, Lord Ferrers, brought us back to the prosaic. He was right: these challenges will make demands on society in terms of the necessary resources. The trouble with the concept of a huge bureaucracy is that it suggests that everyone is being told what to do and is responding unwillingly. We did not talk about huge bureaucracies in the First and Second World Wars, although the numbers of government servants increased on both occasions, as they were bound to do. Even in a society much more committed to limited government, the United States was transformed by the Second World War in the amount of its bureaucracy, as the noble Earl calls it. Others among us would not express that in pejorative terms. However, there was a large number of public servants dedicated to fulfilling a goal which society recognised as being of such significance that all society subscribed to it.