Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, in a debate on a climate change Bill and in an era when a candidate for the presidency of the United States believes that the world began in 4004 BC, it is happy that we can take for our text on the amendment Genesis, chapter 27, verse 22. The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau. Today, the voice is the voice of Caithness but the words are the words of Crickhowell. It is genuinely bad luck for my noble friend Lord Crickhowell that he should have been in Moscow for the first day of the Committee stage and is in Mexico for the first day on Report, but he is to be greatly admired for the extent to which he carries out climate change research on the ground. I shall not rehearse what I said in Committee about the British Library Bill but, unlike my noble friend Lord Caithness, I find both my noble friend’s Amendment No. 2 and the government Amendment No. 50 to be genuine and constructive responses to the debates that we had then and I could happily support both of them.