Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, again, this is a very interesting subject and one I could speak a lot about, but at this time of night I will restrain my remarks. It is an important point and I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, on raising it. Clearly, one of the major potential flaws of the independence of the Committee on Climate Change is that all its budgets are already fixed by the emissions trading schemes that are already in operation. That is pretty well the case with the EU ETS. The post-2013 proposals have a very precise linear decrease in total carbon dioxide emissions to 21 per cent by 2020. This is in comparison with the 2005 level. Of course, in every other ETS we talk about the 1990 level. I should be interested to hear from the Minister what the 2020 reduction is in terms of 1990 levels. I think that it is pretty compatible with the mid-range target, but the Commission is very clear on the matter and I shall read from its questions and answers document: "““However, a larger reduction is required of the EU ETS sector because it is cheaper to reduce emissions in the ETS sectors””." In fact, in the non-EU ETS sectors that means a reduction of about 10 per cent compared with 2005 for the sectors not covered by the scheme. That illustrates the sort of difficulties that there are and shows that the degrees of freedom that the Committee on Climate Change will have in agreeing budgets because of EU obligations will be severely limited. Of course, it will be more than 50 per cent—I think that it is currently 52 per cent—because it will include aluminium and phosphates in additional sectors. Therefore, very deep questions arise here. I am also interested to hear the Minister’s answer with regard to UK domestic schemes. Will there be a need for any significant scheme, and will carbon budgets and the targets of the Committee on Climate Change be undermined?