Climate Change

We have to do both, because, although certification is helpful, ultimately we all want proper sustainability from planting through to end use. Therefore, anything that financially encourages such practice is worth having, but ultimately we should get it right from start to finish rather than buy our way out of bad practice. In Hereford, we had a 350 campaign meeting in the town hall; it was extremely good, and I enjoyed taking part in it. Something very serious went on there that showed why we need to get the climate change debate handled properly and why we need success in Copenhagen. A lot of people, from all sorts of different political parties, brought forward their little dream lists of things they would like brought about, but they did not have much to do with climate change and were much more about their political and social engineering ideas. The bottom line is that the climate change agenda is an exciting opportunity not only to get the planet set up properly but to ensure that we do so in a way that will work. That means using the market and going with the grain of human behaviour, not fighting every inch of the way and introducing silly things such as the Tobin tax, which was raised at the meeting. That is not to do with climate change; it is to do with people having a social engineering agenda, and it is totally counter-productive to taking genuine steps forward. The countries that are accelerating fastest are not doing it through those sorts of methods. I hope that the Minister will make some comments on the 350 campaign. If we really are at 385 parts per million and going the wrong way, it would be interesting to know what message she can send to the people involved to say, "Look, if we carry on doing it right we will be able to wind those parts per million back to 350 instead of seeing them go up to 450"—we should all be fearful of that. I worry that Britain is lagging behind. In 2007, after a decade of Labour Government, just 1.78 per cent. of energy used in the United Kingdom came from renewable sources. That is a wasted opportunity. I think that it was due not to bad intention but to bad implementation. Germany, France, Spain, Norway, America and Korea are out-performing the UK in solar photovoltaics. Germany has more than 2,500 on-farm anaerobic digesters, compared with 30 in the UK. Norway has been pioneering carbon capture and storage facilities in the North sea since the mid-1990s, while sadly only now are this Government getting serious about CCS. Combined heat and power has become the biggest source of heating in the Netherlands. Then we get on to another matter that I hope the Minister thinks is very serious: green jobs. She is on the record as saying that every job should be a green job. I am pretty unhappy about the Prime Minister promising 400,000 new green jobs in March and then cutting that figure to just 250,000 at the Labour party conference. What happened? Where did those jobs go? Some 150,000 jobs were to be created but now they are not. That sends out all the wrong signals. I know that the hon. Lady will have difficulty defending the Prime Minister's speeches, but we need to keep reminding the Government from all parts of the House that, as she said, jobs should be green jobs. Thirty-five per cent. of our carbon dioxide emissions come from energy supply, 22 per cent. from other industries, 24 per cent. from transport, 4 per cent. from services and 15 per cent. from gas and oil powered heating and cooking in homes, so there is obviously a lot more that we can do. Despite the Government's rhetoric, their record is lamentable. In 1997, Labour claimed in its manifesto that it would reduce carbon dioxide emissions to 20 per cent. below the 1990 levels by 2010. In 2003, that target had become an aspiration to move towards a 20 per cent. reduction. In 2006, the climate change programme review conceded that the target would be missed. In 2008, carbon dioxide emissions were just 10.3 per cent. below 1990 levels—barely halfway towards the Government's target, with less than two years to go. We know that Ministers want to do the right thing, but the Government do not have a great record on this. Therefore, anything we can say or do today to encourage them to get it right at Copenhagen is crucial. In my constituency, there is a company called Green Energy Supplies that sells microgeneration equipment—log-fired boilers. It is suffering because the microgeneration certification scheme insists on certain standards—all good stuff so far. Unfortunately, those standards are achieved under EU regulations. With our microgeneration certification scheme, there is duplication of the same regulations plus a bit of gold-plating, and as a result there is extra cost to the companies that should be the point of the spear in the attack on climate change. Those companies want to make money by selling their products and encouraging people to do microgeneration, but they are being swamped. I am waiting for a meeting on that matter with the Minister's Department, as promised by the Prime Minister, but I have not yet heard when it will be. I and my constituents look forward to hearing from the Government what they are going to do to encourage companies such as Green Energy Supplies in Leominster and let them get on with doing what we all want them to do, which is help cut our carbon emissions. The story of wind farms makes me even crosser. I passionately agree with renewable energy, but the way in which the Reeves Hill wind farm in my constituency was handled makes me want to pull my hair out. Here we have a uniquely beautiful place, and there were 1,500 objections to the wind farm applications. In my eight years as an MP, I have never seen anything like that volume of objections to such a planning application. I asked the Government to call it in and they did, but in the end it was handed back to the council, which had unfortunately already decided to approve it. None of the proper procedures to give people confidence that the planning application protected them from things that they did not want and from their lights going out were followed in the way that they should have been. We are never going to convince people that we are right about renewable energy if the planning process is not used properly—I hesitate to use the word abused. That is a huge regret. Another wasted opportunity is the skew in renewable energy efforts towards wind, without an equally passionate effort on tidal energy. We in this country have a unique opportunity, because we are on an island. We ought to be doing everything that we can to lead the world in alternative and effective renewable energy sources. As the fourth or fifth largest economy in the world, we can do that. We have a unique opportunity to set an example by investing in the research and development necessary to bring forward new technologies. We can prove that if we go with the new technology, we will not only live in a cleaner and better country but create jobs, wealth and energy and deliver what people want at a price they want. Other countries that follow on behind us will then get the benefit, just as they did with the mobile telephone revolution. They do not have to go through the early, painful years, and they can walk straight in and pick up the technology ready and fit for purpose. That is what leading economies should be doing and what we want the Government to do. There is no better example of where the current system is not working than on-farm biodigestion. Farmers have picked up a bill of more than £520 million for extra regulation such as the nitrate vulnerable zones. We understand why the Government wanted that regulation, but what a shame it was not coupled with something such as biodigestion so that when a dairy farmer produced huge quantities of cow muck, instead of being made to build a vast pond to store it in he would have been encouraged to build a biodigestion unit. Then that muck would have been recycled properly and the gas would have gone back into the grid, hopefully with a proper feed-in tariff. We can do those things, and they are being done in other countries. Why are we not leading the world on such technology? Every time we throw food away, it should go into biodigestion. We can do it. It is not rocket science, and it is happening in Germany. It is inexcusable that we hit our dairy farmers with huge bills, when they have the answers to the problems if only they were encouraged and able to invest in the right technology. It is a real tragedy. When I needed a new boiler in my house, I wrote to every energy company and asked whether they could help me get a combined heat and power boiler. I got a straight set of replies saying that they did not do that. We had a demonstration in the Jubilee Room by a company with, I think, a sterling coil boiler, but I could not get one. That is a real shame, and I suspect that if I could not get one it must be much more difficult for our constituents. We need to make it easy for people to do the right thing, encourage them to do it, and show them that when they do it, they win. If we press all those buttons, we will see climate change sceptics disappear because, actually, it will not be worth being sceptical about climate change. It should be profitable and sensible to go with what is right, and people should take pride in it, but it is just too difficult to do so at the moment. If we are finding it too difficult, our poor constituents must find it far, far worse. I am grateful for the opportunity to have a conversation such as this with the Government, and to say to them, "We desperately want you to get it right in Copenhagen. We are very worried because your track record is lousy, but if anybody's got the chance to do it, you have." The tragedy of the debate is that it is not something that can wait. I had the privilege of listening to Al Gore when he spoke to Conservative Front Benchers. We asked him what one thing he would do if he were in our shoes, and his answer was very helpful. He said that the only thing that really matters is getting global agreement. Although I have spoken about things we could do ourselves, to solve this global problem we need a global solution. At the time, that was about moving to Kyoto 2 and making it enforceable, but now it is about Copenhagen, and his words are as true today. I say this to the Government: get that agreement, bind in the people who are causing the trouble and help those who are suffering, but do not come back to us and say, "We tried jolly hard but we're awfully sorry, it didn't work this time." They should go out there and save the planet. After all, what better reason is there to be in politics today?