Climate Change

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Browne, on putting this hugely important issue in front of us. As chairman of the Environment Agency, I have a passionate commitment to protecting and enhancing the environment on which we all depend. We all have to understand and recognise that the prospect of climate change is by far the greatest challenge that any of us faces environmentally over the coming years. I listened with great interest to the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Broers; I see that CP Snow’s ““two cultures”” are now being redefined as the cultures of engineering and science. I am delighted to say that the Environment Agency has some outstanding engineers and some outstanding scientists among those who work for us. There is now broad agreement across the scientific world and most of the political world about the importance of facing up to the challenges that climate change imposes on us. It is of course happening faster than we think. Arctic sea ice is declining much more rapidly than was projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its fourth assessment report. Many scientists now believe that the complete disappearance of Arctic ice in the summer months could happen by 2030, which brings the prospect of dramatic changes to the oceans’ circulation and even more rapid absorption of solar heat on to the earth’s surface. The US Geological Survey has recently published research that estimates that global sea levels could rise by up to 1.5 metres by 2100, which is 50 per cent more than we are currently allowing for in coastal defence projects and three times as much as the IPCC projected. Many of the consequences will be with us sooner than we think. One of the most startling facts about climate change is that, even if the globe stopped producing any carbon dioxide tomorrow, climate change would carry on for another 30 years because of the time lag in the building-up of gases in our atmosphere. We are already beginning to see some of the consequences, even in the UK, such as increasingly erratic weather patterns. Given my role in the Environment Agency, I am starkly conscious of the increasing frequency and severity of flooding in many parts of the country. We are seeing storm surges coming down the North Sea, exacerbating and hastening the erosion on parts of our eastern and southern coasts that has been happening for many centuries. During the past decade we have seen six of the hottest years ever recorded. These things are happening here and now. Most political attention is focused on the economic crisis that we are all living through, but we must not in the course of it lose sight of the climate crisis. If there is one message that I hope will come from our discussions today, it is that we should not use our current economic difficulties as an excuse for burying the climate issues that we need urgently to address as well. We will, God willing, come out of the economic crisis in due course. When we do, the climate crisis will still be there and the clock will be ticking even faster than it is now. The economic and political circumstances that we are living through are an opportunity as well as a challenge. They give us a chance to think seriously about the sustainability of what we do and the consequences for climate change of how we run our businesses, our lives and our economies. The Government, I am pleased to say, have shown some welcome determination in this area. The publication of the Stern report changed the terms of debate about the importance of the environment in relation to the economy. The passing of the Climate Change Act is a world first in placing legal responsibilities on present and future Governments to work to mitigate climate change. The commitment to reducing carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050 is enormously welcome, as is the creation of the new Department of Energy and Climate Change, explicitly linking those two parts of government policy together in the same department. Some of the energy efficiency programmes that have been put in place are welcome, too—it is just a pity that the Government made the wrong decision about Heathrow. However, we need to do more and I put four proposals in front of your Lordships today. First, let us take a lesson from Barack Obama and see green technology and green jobs as being central to the answers to the economic difficulties that we are going through. I have been hugely impressed, during President Obama’s campaign, his inaugural address and subsequently, by the way in which he has seen a coherent, concerted and determined effort to develop green technology and green jobs as a central part of his economic package. We should do the same here. We have had some welcome bits and pieces of initiatives from the Government, but we have not as yet had the determined, coherent and cohesive national programme of green economic development that we should aim for. Secondly, we need to aim for the complete decarbonisation of power generation by 2050, which means looking seriously at the development of a whole range of renewable technologies. We have done some things on wind power and hydropower, but there is a lot more that we could do. One area in which we need to put a lot more research effort is tidal power and the ways in which it could be harnessed without causing unacceptable damage to the ecology and environments of coasts and estuaries. I am very pleased to hear in the Government’s most recent announcement that they have put £500,000 into research on tidal fences and reefs. We need to do much more. Thirdly, we need to make a serious effort to develop carbon capture and storage. If we are to have coal-fired power generation into the future, it would be environmentally unacceptable for it to be without integral carbon capture and storage. It is not enough to say that Kingsnorth can go ahead provided that it is carbon capture ready. If it is to go ahead as a coal-fired power station, it must include carbon capture and storage as a major, large-scale demonstration project from the word go. One of the iron laws of the market economy is that, if one places requirements of that kind on the private sector, it will deliver, but one has to ensure that those requirements are in place. It will be difficult and expensive—the technology is as yet in its infancy—but we have a real opportunity not just to get Kingsnorth right but to take a global lead in developing a technology that the world is going to need. Fourthly, we need to prepare for the Copenhagen summit later this year, because international endeavour in getting a carbon budgets and trading system right for an international agreement on tackling climate change boldly and effectively is a priority. These are difficult things to do. Some will be expensive, but many will reap huge dividends in the future. They are difficult but not impossible. We have succeeded in environmental improvement before. Sulphur dioxide emissions are down by some 90 per cent on 20 years ago—we have virtually solved the problems of acid rain and we have improved water quality enormously. We now need to apply the same political, economic and environmental will to what is quite simply the most important challenge that our generation faces. Yes, we must do it, and, to coin a phrase, ““Yes, we can””.