Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, to sponsor an amendment against one’s own Government is a very serious business. In more than 10 years in this House, I have done so only once before, when I moved an amendment adding a public interest test to the Communications Act 2003. For that reason, I shall speak at a little greater length than has been my practice. This is, as noble Lords have heard, a very important debate. For me, it happens to be the most important debate, because it goes to the heart of the overall rationale for the Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, put his finger on this in one of our committee deliberations when he observed that this is not a carbon trading Bill; it is the Climate Change Bill, which happens to include a provision on carbon trading. The Joint Committee probably spent more time discussing the trading of carbon credits than any other single issue. On domestic versus purchased credits, we were reassured by the wording and what we assumed to be the intent of the Kyoto protocols, which have the very clear requirement that purchased carbon credits are supplemental to domestic carbon reductions—paragraphs 92 to 94 on page 34 of our report set it all out. There is no ambiguity in this unless you actively look for it. This resulted in my original concept, which was supported by an observation by the noble Lord, Lord Turner, on the radio the other day. He made the point that the 2020 target was the real challenge, which reinforced the suggestion that I have been making for a while of a 50 per cent cap, with a taper every five years from 2020 onwards, falling to around 15 per cent in 2050, by which time one would hope that the whole thing will have become academic. I am afraid that I find myself sponsoring the amendment because I had no response whatever from the Government. Leaving the whole thing to the climate change committee is an attractive option but, as the Minister has reminded us on any number of occasions, these essentially political decisions should remain with Parliament. This is a defensibly consistent and principled position, but it results in the need to clarify to the greatest degree possible an appropriate cap and to put it into the Bill. Surely there can be no decision more political in effect than constraining the way in which people live their lives. In essence, given the Bill’s present form, the Government are seeking to persuade us simply to trust them to do the right thing. That indicates that those who drafted the Bill do not get out too much. The present clause amounts to not much more than a ““get out of jail free”” card. I am sure that that is not what was intended, but it is certainly how any objective observer will inevitably see it. Why should we suffer this lack of faith in politicians to be trusted to work things out on our behalf? Why will the committee of the noble Lord, Lord Turner, despite our best intentions, inevitably struggle for legitimacy, working off the back of years and years of governmental compromise, inactivity and dithering in this area? How, as the Environmental Audit Committee reported last week, can green taxes, as a proportion of all taxes, have declined from a peak of 9.7 per cent in 1999 to 7.6 per cent in 2006? Why is this lack of trust so complete that the requirement to have a specific figure in the Bill becomes absolutely compelling? I think that I found at least part of the answer recently in a book entitled Blessed Unrest by the American environmental architect Paul Hawken. He wrote: "““We live in a faith-based economy, and by that I do not refer to religious practice. People are asked to place their faith in economic and political systems that have polluted water, air, and sea; that have despoiled communities, sacked workforces, reduced incomes for most people in the world for the past three decades, and created a stratosphere sufficiently permeated with industrial gases that we are in effect playing dice with the planet … As that faith begins to seem more and more misplaced, the way to change the world is to change one’s own practices, including one’s home, source of energy, method of agriculture, diet, transport patterns, and communities. Not that Kyoto Protocols shouldn’t be signed or adopted … Efforts must continue to be directed to bring about institutional change, but such efforts cannot succeed unless people reexamine how they behave and consume in their own lives””." Later today, we are likely to hear arguments from those who feel strongly that in purchasing carbon offsets you are in effect helping to kick-start the benign development of what we used to call ““the third world””. Anticipating these arguments from Peers for whom I have the greatest respect, perhaps I may offer a few counter-arguments. The first is eloquently expressed by Kevin Smith in this month’s issue of Resurgence. He states: "““The concept underpinning the whole system of carbon trading and offsetting is that a ton of carbon here is exactly the same as a ton of carbon there. That is, if it’s cheaper to reduce emissions in India than it is in the UK, then you can achieve the same climate benefit in a more cost-effective manner by making the reduction in India.""But the seductive simplicity of this concept is based on collapsing a whole series of important considerations, such as land rights, North-South inequalities, local struggles, corporate power and colonial history, into the single question of cost-effectiveness. The mechanisms of emissions trading and offsetting represent a reductionist approach to climate change that negates””," any number of, "““complex variables in favour of cost-effectiveness””." The difference in argumentation between myself and those who will speak after me may simply reflect a difference in background and personal experience. The cost-effectiveness case, with its attractive development underpinning, is advanced in the main by economists, whereas my arguments stem from my background as a film producer and, for the past six years, as president of UNICEF. My raw material is people—people at their best and people at their worst. Commodify them and they tend to behave badly. Explain what needs to be done, the reasons that lie behind it and what can be done to improve things and, as often as not, they will surprise and perhaps even amaze you. We need this amendment or something very like it to force the hand of the Government, whichever Government that might be, to allow the people of this country to be good instead of simply being given the opportunity to look good. As Paul Hawken put it, to, "““reexamine how they behave and consume in their own lives””." The Prime Minister continually reminds us that we have to face some tough choices. Unfortunately, these are seldom spelt out. This amendment would help unambiguously to set out the implications of where we have got to and what will be required of all of us if we are to start putting things right. I can only urge my colleagues on the Labour Benches to support what I believe to be a very important amendment.