Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, I support the spirit of the amendment, but perhaps not its exact words. I declare an interest as the administrator of the UK part of the European emissions trading system and, I hope, the future administrator of the carbon reduction commitment, should your Lordships deign to pass it. It seems clear that the mood of the House is that there needs to be something more powerful in the Bill than currently, in terms of the domestic commitment to decarbonise the UK economy. I do not want to wax lyrical, as the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, did, about our global obligations and moral commitment; I want to be fairly practical, domestic and dirty about this. I have two points. First, let us clarify whether it gets in the way of trading if you have a bigger proportion of the carbon reduction coming from the UK economy. The reality is that it does not. At the moment, as an economy we are still grossly inefficient in energy use, hardly off the starting blocks on renewable energy and well behind in the development of a domestic set of industries in the new, decarbonised global economy, and eventually that will turn around and bite us. The reality is that there is bags of scope here in the UK for our energy to be decarbonised and for there to be in fact very little need to resort to the mechanism of the trading system, which is really a mechanism put in place to allow people to choose to buy credits for emissions rather than reducing their own emissions. What we want is people buckling down and tackling the job of reducing their own emissions, not simply because it will be important for climate change but because, frankly, it will get embarrassing, globally, if many countries across the world are beginning to develop a head of steam in the new carbon reduction technologies and we are failing to do so. In the interests of our domestic industry in opening up innovative products and creating new global markets that we are there in front of, not straggling along behind, it is pretty important that we get the initiative to decarbonise the UK economy moving far faster than it has done so far. This does not get in the way of trading. It will help our global position. I recognise the concern of the noble Lord, Lord Turner, that we do not get the balance wrong in the opposite direction. At the moment, if we are not careful, the balance will very much be to help our international partners in the developing world to reduce their carbon. We need to make sure that we do not get the balance wrong in the opposite direction, fail in our obligations and do not provide the glue that the noble Lord, Lord Stern, indicated was necessary to keep the global deal going. That, for me, says one thing: the Bill is not sufficiently strong because the default position will be for trading rather than for domestic reduction. Although I would not want to see a number placed in the Bill for the proportion of reductions coming from UK action, I very much want to see a real commitment in the Bill for a fast movement towards the decarbonising of the UK economy. Before the next stage of the Bill, we ought to urge the Minister to explore how that can be worded in a way that does not take away from the very real need for the Committee on Climate Change to give specific advice on this. We certainly need to strengthen the Bill in this way.