Queen’s Speech

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to take part in a debate opened by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. He is an adornment to your Lordships’ House—although not at this precise moment—and all the more so since the Spectator last week awarded him the title of "politician to watch" in this country. He is rightly held in high esteem on all sides of the House. It is also a pleasure in anticipation to look forward to the wind-up of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, with whom all of us on this side have enjoyed friendly debates in the past. However, I shall be disagreeing with them both fundamentally—and with most others who have spoken, I regret to say—on the only subject that I intend to talk about, which is energy policy and climate change. I regret to say also that I did not hear anything in the Queen’s Speech or, it must be said, in reply to the Queen’s Speech that would give any of us any hope that this country will any time soon abandon its mad rush to economic self-destruction by jettisoning its crippling obsession with the pursuit of renewable energy. As it happens, I am a climate change sceptic, a position that the Times revealed in a recent leading article that it had discovered to be one shared by the majority of the population of this country. I do not believe that it has been established that rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere bear any responsibility for increases in global temperatures when those have occurred, nor even that higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are necessarily harmful. Perhaps they are beneficial. CO2, as commercial horticulture has discovered, acts like a fertiliser promoting plant growth—possibly an advantage in a world threatened with food shortages. Be that as it may, even if one believes in taking the precaution of seeking to reduce human-caused carbon emissions, which let us not forget amount to only some 3.3 per cent of the annual carbon releases from all sources, the pursuit of wind power, which is the chief focus of the Government’s renewable energy policy, is absurd. In the first place, it does not fulfil its raison d’être. Not even the Government claim that wind farms have had any responsibility for the reduction in UK carbon emissions that has been recorded in the past year or two. This is hardly surprising, as no conventional power stations can be shut down as the wind carpet, as it is known, expands; they must be kept in a state of constant readiness—spinning reserve, as it is known—to come on stream when the wind fails. In the second place, the amount of electricity that wind farms produce is pitifully small—a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Judd, though perhaps more mildly. All the 2,300 wind turbines now in place, covering thousands of square miles, produce in a year half as much electricity as a single modern nuclear power station sitting on 30 acres. Even Germany’s 20,000 wind turbines cannot produce more than some 6 per cent of that country’s annual electricity consumption. Thirdly, there is the collateral damage: the destruction of some of our finest upland scenery—I declare an interest as an opponent of wind farm applications close to where I live in the north-west of England, near the noble Lord, Lord Judd—and of our seascapes; and the oppression of local democracy by the Government. I draw attention to the second paragraph of the Queen’s Speech, which states: ""My Government will work to build trust in democratic institutions"." How can the Government say that and at the same time do all that they are doing to stifle local opposition to wind farms? Are the planning process and public inquiries not democratic institutions? The Government are currently doing everything in their power to coerce all the bodies that they can reach, in particular local authorities and the Planning Inspectorate, to assume responsibility for the achievement of the Government’s—in my view—outlandish and unaffordable renewable energy targets. Not only are the Government trying to pressure local authorities and the Planning Inspectorate to wave through wind farms over the heads of local opposition but they seem determined to rely increasingly on the so-called power of recovery, which involves the Secretary of State calling in the final decision for him to take, thereby reducing the inspector’s role to that of an adviser. In such cases, the Secretary of State or the official acting on his behalf will have heard none of the evidence that the inspector will likely have spent several weeks listening to and assessing. This seems to be guaranteed to undermine the perception in the public mind of the true independence of the Planning Inspectorate and risks destroying the reputation that it has built up over decades. I know of two local cases in which the Secretary of State has recently exercised this power. I would be most grateful if the Minister who winds up the debate will say how frequently and on what grounds he expects this power to be used in the future in wind farm application appeals. There is also the small matter of the expense. No one would contract to buy wind-produced electricity unless the law obliged them to, because its supply cannot be guaranteed in any quantity at all from one moment to the next, and no one would erect wind turbines without a subsidy. The subsidy is currently double the price that wind farm operators receive for the electricity that they produce, and the cost is borne by the consumer. The noble Lord, Lord O’Neill of Clackmannan, referred to this. It is estimated that the cost is more than £1 billion a year today and will reach at least £4 billion a year by 2020 were the Government to reach their renewable energy targets. This lucrative prospect for the developer, paid for by the humble consumer, is what enables developers to enrich selected farmers and landowners, in some cases to bribe communities and everywhere to sow divisions in rural societies. It is not surprising that the Government have made no progress towards their target of abolishing fuel poverty. Indeed, the movement has been in the other direction. On the Government’s figures, the number of those in fuel poverty has steadily increased year by year and has more than doubled between 2003 and 2007. The more general effect is to reduce everyone’s standard of living and to render our businesses internationally uncompetitive. The European Union, which has played a leading role in the great renewable energy adventure—sadly, this now applies to the United States—is determined to saddle itself with the same handicap. Rising Asia, however, has no intention of doing so. It is in a hurry to reach western standards of living, using the same means that we did, and it will continue to use the world’s plentiful supplies of the world’s cheapest abundant fuel—coal—to produce most of its electricity. Our behaviour will have no effect on it whatever and will have a derisory influence on the world’s carbon emissions, even if we succeed by our efforts, which is highly unlikely, in reducing our own carbon emissions. If we want it to reduce its emissions, we will have to pay it and so advance even faster its economies at the expense of our own. That is what Copenhagen is all about. However, is the bubble about to burst, as Professor Ian Fells of Newcastle University was recently quoted as forecasting? I would dearly like to think so, but powerful lungs continue to inflate it, as I have indicated. There have been signs of a widening realisation of the threats to our energy security, posed by our failure to install in a timely and effective way replacements for those of our power stations that are shortly to be phased out to comply with earlier European environmental legislation. More independent commentators seem to have taken a stand against wind power, and the debate on climate change has most certainly begun, as anyone can see who read the article by my noble friend Lord Lawson in the Times yesterday or listened last night to the debate on "Newsnight" over the apparent revelation that the Climate Research Unit attached to the University of East Anglia had been manipulating the scientific data on global warming. In that context, will the Minister who winds up the debate say what the Government propose to do in the wake of these revelations, especially as both sides to the debate have now called for a public inquiry? Will the Government set one up? Do they not think it a very grave matter indeed if the integrity of the evidence on which the western world’s climate change policy is based can be thus called into question and the reputation of British science and of a government-funded scientific institution impugned? We should have the debate on climate change in Parliament, too. Parliament should not be a climate change temple in which we all meet from time to time to say our prayers together. I only hope that the next Government will have the wisdom and the strength to reassert our national self-interest and above all to restore rationality to the determination of our energy policy. Otherwise, I fear for our national future.