Climate Change

It is a great pleasure to follow the distinguished right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer), who seems to hit more bases in one short speech than the rest of us put together, even if some of those bases are slightly awry. I may return to that point later. It was also a pleasure to hear my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Frank Dobson) talk about Bangladesh, partly because the all-party parliamentary climate change group of the Westminster Parliament is currently conducting an inquiry jointly with the Bangladeshi Parliament's all-party climate change group. We hope to publish our report just in time for Copenhagen. It has been said many times this afternoon that the Copenhagen process seemed likely to move—in the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Newport, West (Paul Flynn) during climate change questions this morning—at the pace of an arthritic sloth. We have a cartload of low expectations from a conference that was previously billed as the last chance saloon. Once the negotiations started in earnest—once the poker game had begun—all the high-flown expressions of ambition and aspiration seem to have been blown out of the window. Now that people have been asked to put their chips on the table, we find that those chips appear to be non-existent. In the words of President Obama, COP 15 is now merely a "significant step". Others have referred to it as merely a window of opportunity, but in my view that should probably read "widow of opportunity". It certainly seems likely to prove a missed opportunity. As I said in an intervention earlier, in Barcelona this week the African group engaged in what some described as a walk-out and others termed a difference of opinion which caused them not to attend a meeting. In any event, the fact is that they are extremely disappointed that the annexe 1 countries are not coming up with the numbers: the chips on the table. One wonders why we should expect the African continent, or many other developing regions, to have any trust in our promises, given that—as we have seen in recent days—the European Union, while still making these great promises, has found it so difficult to deliver. The United States, thankfully, is moving at quite a rapid pace to escape the eight years of total inactivity on climate change that occurred under George W. Bush, but what it is offering seems to me to be far too little. The headline figure of the Waxman-Markey Bill appears to be a 4 per cent. cut in carbon emissions, against a 1990 baseline, by 2020. Given that a 5 per cent. global cut was talked about at Kyoto, the United States ambition must be set in context; it is not high enough. Even though that over-1,000-page Bill, which contains many other very good measures, has now slipped through the House of Representatives with the slenderest of margins, the overall ambition seems minimal. If the Americans do not increase their ambitions, I cannot understand why the Chinese would want to put their chips on the table. In those circumstances, why on earth would the European Union want to pursue its higher intended budgets? There are competition issues, and many business lobbies would exercise a great deal of sway over that. What does all the delay mean? What does it amount to? Scientists are already talking about us being committed to a 2.4° increase in temperature, even if we stop all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions today. Our commitment, of course, is to try to contain the increase to less than 2°. Professor Schellnhuber, who is Angela Merkel's climate change adviser and a main member of the IPCC, has illustrated how serious this problem is. He said that if emissions peak in 2010—next year—we will need an annual cut of 2 per cent. if we are to halve global emissions by 2050, relative to 1990. If the peak occurs in 2015, which is when the IPCC says that we should reach it, the annual cut required increases to 3.6 per cent. If we peak in 2020, which is the most likely possibility in the mind of a realistic optimist, that translates into a 6 per cent. annual cut in greenhouse gas emissions. If the peak happens in 2025, which is perhaps bordering on the pessimistic, the figure is 12 per cent. If we go to 2030, which is not that far away, the annual cut is 22 per cent. Those figures are horrendous however we look at them. Lord Stern has pointed out that what we are trying to do is more demanding than even the accidental reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that take place in any recession.