Heathrow (Third Runway)

I shall vote for the motion, which was originally tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Selby (Mr. Grogan). I do not care who is in the Lobby with me or what contradictions they bring with them. Given that the House is not allowed to vote specifically on the Heathrow third runway, the vote this evening will be seen as a surrogate for that. I say to all those who wriggle about and pretend that it will not, that that is how it will be perceived outside. I hope that those who live in the vicinity of Heathrow will forgive me for making next to no comments about their circumstances. That is not through lack of sympathy, but simply because I regard the matter as an overwhelmingly national and ecological issue. It is in that context that I want to address my remarks to the House. I get most dispirited about the House when it cloaks itself in delusions, and the most consistent delusion that has paraded itself around in this debate is that, when we come out of the present global crisis, we will somehow go back to business as usual, and that we will be able to carry on with this everlasting expansion, over-production, over-consumption and over-pollution. It simply is not going to be like that. Two years ago, the International Energy Agency issued a report that said that, by 2013, the world would face an energy supply crisis. It added the caveat that the only thing that might delay that crisis was the possibility of a global slump. It is some kind of lifeline, but that is what we are immersed in at the moment. When we come out of it, in whatever way we do so, that energy crisis will be waiting for us. The scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change revise their climate change predictions forward every time they meet, in such a way that we now have a window of opportunity of probably six to eight years in which to make profound changes to the way in which we think about the framework of the economies in which we live, and in which we hope that our children will be able to live. I like to think that President Obama understands some of this, and that he understands the urgent need for change now. I also like to think that my own Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change understands that. He has done many inspirational things, and one of them is so inspirational that I do not think the House has a clue what it means. It is that we are committed to introducing annual carbon budgets at the end of this year. It will come as a huge shock to households, businesses and other parts of our infrastructure when they have to live within their annual carbon budget. The delusional aspect of the provisions will become apparent only when we try to hide behind the presumption that the budgets can be forward-projected, that we do not really have to meet them until 2050, that, in the context of aviation, they can be premised on the basis of planes that do not exist yet, and—worse still—that the emissions trading scheme will somehow get everyone off the hook. The presumption will be that we will be able to continue to pollute as we like, while paying others to clean the planet up in ways that we will not do. The emissions trading scheme is a cheats' charter. It will not work, because everyone involved—including ourselves—is part of the cheating game. If we want to address how we should deliver our climate change targets, we need to do so in the now. That is the context in which I want to address the issue of the third runway. Just a couple of months ago, Jim Hansen from NASA said that, if we were to survive the century, we would have to constrain climate change within 2° C. That probably means lowering the carbon threshold to 350 parts per million, not the 450 parts per million that we are currently talking about. That would be an astonishing target for us to set ourselves. Jim Hansen is still vaguely optimistic about that, but James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia theory, has now given up on that premise. He says that, by 2050, we are likely to have had to divide the UK into three, just to survive. One third would have to accommodate the entire population of 57 million. The second third would have to be given over to intensive agriculture, and the third handed back to nature. If that happens, I suspect that not a single person who is squeezed into that space in central England will be sitting there saying, ““Well, I'm glad we got that third runway. It's certainly made a difference to the quality of our lives.”” That is nonsensical. If we are going to take carbon budgets seriously, we have to begin to budget for them now. How we reduce aviation's contribution to carbon emissions overall is one question; how we deal with the additional emissions resulting from a third runway is quite another. The figures in the official documents state that 11.7 million tonnes of carbon equivalents will be emitted as a result of the third runway, on an annualised basis. How do we translate that? If we were to offset it by something positive, it would mean that we had to deliver and install 7.2 million solar roofs in the UK. If we take out apartment blocks and everything north facing, it probably means the entirety of south-facing roofs in the UK. If we did not offset those emissions through a positive counter, we might have to reduce the carbon impact of things that we currently do. That could work out as the equivalent of taking 4.5 million cars—one in six—off the road. We might want to do that in a fairer way and say to every car owner that for two months every year their cars would be impounded—and they would just have to live with it. If we did not want to do that, we could look into reducing electricity consumption. To achieve the required offset would mean permanently disconnecting 5 million households from the electricity supply for the duration of the existence of the third runway. We might want to share the impact of that more equally, so we could say that every household could take a share of the cut—every day each of us would have to do without any energy in our homes for four and a half hours. Those are the real costs that we have to trade off among ourselves to live within an annualised carbon budget—and the budget is not even static. To get to the position we need to be in by 2050 effectively means shrinking our carbon footprint on the basis of an annualised 3 per cent. reduction per year, probably right through the entirety of this century. That requires meeting transformational demands, affecting the whole way we live. I suspect that, in the future, we will live in more localised or more regionalised economies. I think we can live simpler and better lives, but I will tell you this, Mr. Deputy Speaker—whichever way we try to make this stack up, a third runway is not part of the solution, but part of the problem.