Climate Change: Carbon Budgets

My Lords, the problem with global warming and climate change is that the urgency of the task requires action. Moreover, it requires change and sacrifice. The church often prefers to deliberate, talk, reflect, pray, debate or plan. It prefers to do anything other than do something or, as in this case, stop doing things. It is clear from this debate that meeting carbon budgets is a precise, calculated and even legally definable science. Many noble Lords are telling us what we might do and how we might do it. I shall offer some comments on the effects of global warming that can be observed, as the alarming photos of disappearing ice in the Arctic or on the alpine glaciers show. The deductions based on them virtually all point in one direction; namely, how we decide to live more frugally in energy terms. I believe that that is a precise and positive choice and not a matter to be left to economic laissez faire. This makes what happens at the Copenhagen summit all the more important. As we can see, the production of more evidence along the lines of the CCC’s progress report is not in itself enough to galvanise people to act. The more vulnerable nations already suffering from a less predictable climate are less able to help themselves, so significant efforts to cut emissions will be made only when the nations make a commitment to act in concert. To do that, their leaders need an indication that a decent proportion of their people are behind them. It is the intention of the Church of England to persuade its members to support our Government in their endeavours to co-operate with other nations and, more significantly, to act itself. The most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury is going to Copenhagen to preach there and to make our support explicit. Last month, the church issued a seven-year plan to be implemented by its 16,200 churches and 4,700 schools across the UK in an effort to cut the combined annual carbon footprint of around 330,000 tonnes of CO2. The report, Church and Earth, includes emissions reduction targets for the church as a whole in line with the national target of 80 per cent by 2050, and with an interim aim of reducing the church’s carbon footprint by 42 per cent by 2020. This plan puts education and young people at the heart of the church’s climate change strategy, with all 4,700 church schools nationwide aiming to achieve "eco-school" status and implementing Government policy on education for sustainable development. It is not only the Church of England; the world’s major faiths have drawn up long-term plans which were discussed at Windsor in November by more than 200 leaders of faith groups as part of their programme for "seven-year plans for generational change". The major faith communities worldwide recognise unequivocally that there is a moral imperative to tackle the causes of global warming. They have a crucial role to play around the world as key agents of change in pressing for changes in behaviour at every level of society and in every economic sector. Faith groups reach half of all the world’s schools and have been called on by the Secretary-General of the United Nations to, ""inspire people to change [by setting] an example for the lifestyles of billions of people, and encourage politicians to act more boldly"." The churches have accepted the responsibility to learn how to live and develop sustainability in a world of finite resources, and we will redouble our efforts to reduce emissions that result from our institutional and individual activities. The noble Lord, Lord Krebs, referred to water as a particular example. In the part of sub-Saharan Africa that I know well—Sudan—it is quite clear that water shortage is not only a present difficulty in environmental terms, but that it is also highly likely that access to water and, indeed, how the Nile is treated higher up than Sudan, will be the cause of major conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa in years to come. It is not just a matter of our carbon footprint now and over the next 20 years, it also a question that profoundly affects the possibilities for peace in that very troubled area of the world. If Ethiopia were to cut off supplies from the Blue Nile, Egypt would at once become unsustainable and infertile. There would be an immediate and determined attempt by the Egyptians to try to enforce the plans and covenants they have tried to put in place over the waters of the Blue Nile. It is only one example of the way in which the patterns of our future lifestyle are interconnected and require us not merely to make national or even modest international progress in trying to act together, but to mobilise the community of the world. That is needed not only for the sustainability of our world in terms of lifestyle, carbon emissions and climate change governance, but also to provide for the world a pattern of living together in such a way that we will be able to avoid some of the conflicts that will inevitably come upon us if we do not take these options seriously. Surely these kind of corporate commitments are preferable to what the report calls the, ""more forceful role for Government"." That is not what we need. What we need is a greater degree of co-operation between the nations of the world, to act together in this, as in so much else.