Climate Change

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Frank Dobson), who is absolutely right to draw attention to the way in which climate change threatens soonest and most severely some of the poorest people in the world. This has so far been an extremely interesting debate. Incidentally, I am very happy to tell the House that earlier today, the Green Energy (Definition and Promotion) Bill, a private Member's Bill, which I had the honour to introduce some months ago, passed its final stages in the upper House. I should like to record my personal gratitude not only to the Ministers and officials in the Department of Energy and Climate Change who helped and advised on the Bill, but to the noble Lord Whitty, who so skilfully steered the measure through another place. We have heard already, in particular from the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes), about the threat to global biodiversity and natural things. When I had the pleasure of hosting an event the other day in this place for the organisation Plantlife, of which I am a trustee—it published a new book called "The Ghost Orchid Declaration" about the plight of wild plants in our country—I was vividly reminded that one in five of our wild plants is currently threatened with extinction. Each county in our country is losing, on average, two of its wild plants every year. Obviously, the causes of that are complex. It is to do with unsustainable farming practices, a planning system that does not understand the needs of wild things, poor management, and in some cases climate change. Above all, it is to do with neglect. There is always something more important, a more pressing agenda, or someone making a row about something other than the plight of wild plants. I mention that only because I think something rather similar has affected the debate about climate change for very many years. It is 17 years since the Rio conference, and today we are having a discussion in the Chamber almost as if it never happened.