Climate Change

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, for bringing forward this important debate about carbon dioxide emission targets. I shall declare two interests before I start. I am president of the Micropower Council and a non-executive director of a heating company that specialises in combined heat and power, district heating and geothermal energy. It is clear that there is quite a lot of agreement in the House on this issue, with the exception of the noble Lords, Lord Reay and Lord Tanlaw. We have had a wide-ranging debate and a particularly interesting contribution from the noble Baroness, Lady Flather, who has just spoken. There is also agreement that if we are to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions we need to do two things. The first is to use less energy, whether at home, in our offices, in travelling, or in buying everything we want in the modern world. Secondly, we need to try to use more renewable energy and phase out energy sources that produce carbon dioxide, although there is no agreement about exactly how we might do that. It is disappointing that over recent years, although we talk and agree a lot about things, the progress we have made towards our ambitions has been a little slow. Carbon dioxide emissions in the United Kingdom have risen 4 per cent since 1999 and 1 per cent in the past year alone. The Government have said that that makes it difficult for them to reach their domestic target of 20 per cent reduction in carbon dioxide by 2010. The other disappointing thing is that although we have green taxes, the take from them is falling. It was 3.6 per cent of our gross domestic product in 1999 but in 2006 it was only 2.7 per cent. Energy consumption has gone up by more than 3 per cent since 1997 and the most disturbing bit is the 11 per cent increase in electricity consumption. Although we have made progress on renewable resources—we can argue about which ones are effective and so on—the UK’s domestic electricity target of 4.6 per cent from renewables is some way off the 10 per cent for 2010. I shall touch on aviation, with which the noble Lord, Lord Soley, is familiar. Of course, there has been a 61 per cent increase in air passengers since 1997 and aircraft emissions are up 23 per cent. I agree with the noble Lord that we need to be careful about how we talk about this because it is not straightforward, as his example showed. The other big transport issues are cars and the traffic on our roads, which is up 12 per cent since 1997. We are all very good at setting targets. I put myself into that category, too, in the work that I have done in this area over the years. As I am speaking from the Liberal Democrat Front Bench, I will be a bit political—I know that the noble Lord, Lord Bhattacharyya, said that he was not going to be political on this—but I will talk about what we believe. We could reach 100 per cent reduction in our CO2 emissions by 2050 and we have put forward a comprehensive range of policies based on evidence that we have taken relating to climate change mitigation and adoption within the United Kingdom as well as in the international arena. We see a zero-carbon Britain that will be energy independent and that does not overly rely on foreign sources. Action at EU level, such as the European supergrid will be very important in breaking our current dependence on fossil fuels imported from Russia and the Middle East. We believe that the EU Emissions Trading Scheme has the potential to be a major lever for promoting low carbon technology. Lots of people have talked about how we need to change what we are doing and change behaviour, but we need to ensure that the price of the carbon is appropriate. I want to touch on five key areas that we have looked at—there are a lot more. The first is a commitment to 100 per cent carbon-free, non-nuclear electricity by 2050. If we are to do that we need to provide incentives for people to use renewable energy, microgeneration, guaranteed prices, feed-in tariffs and smart meters. We think that we could make the programme about half as long as the one put forward by the Government. We need to build decent high speed railways and back all sorts of rail improvements. We would try to pay for that by tolling lorries on motorways. We want to introduce green loans to finance the upgrading of our housing stock. I shall say a bit more about that later, but that would be in addition to extra money to help the fuel poor, which is again a point mentioned earlier in the debate. It would be a national scheme, enabling householders to apply for funding to insulate their homes and to finance microgeneration renewable energy, and at the same time avoid large upfront costs. The cost of the work would be in the form of a loan, repaid over a period agreed by the householder paying the repayments through their energy bills. When I got married in the 1960s, I paid off my cooker and fridge on my energy bill, and I do not see why we cannot do that sort of thing to help people pay for the cost of refurbishment in their homes. It is important to tax the people who pollute and use the money to reduce income tax. I have already mentioned the EU ETS and we want to see the permits being auctioned, as we would get a better price for carbon in that way. I shall now spend a little time talking about the energy efficiency of buildings, which is an area on which I have campaigned over the years. I lived in Stockholm in the late 1960s and early 1970s in a properly insulated flat. It was cheaper to heat than the box I had left behind in England, partly because it was so well insulated and partly because there was a decent and more efficient heating scheme in the area. I realised that they did not have excess winter deaths; there was no such thing as fuel poverty. It is a great disappointment to me that 40 years later we are still not building to those standards in this country. We are beginning to get towards it, but we still have not used combined heat and power and district heating in the same way as they have done in Scandinavia. None of this is new technology. It is all tried and tested, and it works. In the other place I successfully piloted the Home Energy Conservation Act 1995—with the help of a lot of other people, I have to say—through Parliament. It was an enabling Bill to allow local authorities to gather statistics about how energy efficient the homes in their area were. The Government would then have those figures to target resources and local government could suggest ideas on how they thought they could be improved. Unfortunately, the Government did not run with it. They never used the Bill as they could have done to give them the information that they need, and now they want to repeal it, which is bitterly disappointing, although I do not think they have got that far yet. The Government will say that we have the Climate Change Act, which is the most challenging legislation in any developed country. That is true and we are making progress, but it is regrettable that we have lost so much time. There has been too little finance and too many disparate schemes in recent years. There have been lots of good intentions but they are often not properly carried through. Lastly, I shall touch on the Government’s record in their own buildings, which the noble Lord, Lord Soley, referred to earlier.