Climate Change: Carbon Budgets

My Lords, in his first party conference speech after the Labour Party won the election in 1997, the Prime Minister, Mr Blair, took climate change as his major theme. He distributed a 5,000-word essay on the subject by his Chief Scientific Adviser. This set the tone for a Government whose recognition of the problem and the concomitant need for action, both national and globally co-ordinated, has been world-leading and much to their credit. Jonathon Porritt recently stepped down as chair of the Sustainable Development Commission, which he chaired with a fascinating mixture of distinction and occasional exasperation. He said, ""the Climate Change Act … for me stands out as the single most important addition to the Statute Book that this Government has achieved"." I concur with that appraisal. It brings me to today’s debate, in which I want to make three points, at diminishing length. I shall spend most of my time on the first point. As we have heard, the Committee on Climate Change, which was established by the Climate Change Act, recently issued its first annual report. I declare my interest, as I have been one of the eight members of that committee from its inception. The most significant aspect of the report is embodied in its title, Meeting Carbon Budgets—The Need for a Step Change. To draw an analogy that comes comfortably to an Australian, the simple fact is that we are falling behind the run rate—not just the run rate for 2050, but for 2022. It is understandable, but unfortunate. It essentially derives from the gap between the Government’s sincere aspirations and the fact that many of the consequent actions run up against political difficulties. Let me give the House four examples. My first example is nuclear energy. In 1997, the amount of electricity on the grid coming from nuclear had just slipped below 30 per cent. Today, it is below 20 per cent, and we have heard of the difficulties of ramping it back up. Of course nuclear has problems, as does, essentially, every method of generating energy. On the other hand, expert opinion—the Government have come round to this view more recently, but the lag will linger—sees it as a necessary component, along with other things, in the medium term. It was a difficult issue to deal with because it lay on the fault-line between old Labour and new Labour. My second example is wind power. My noble friend Lord Krebs has already pointed out that wind power—and I shall not take a detour to respond in detail to the jeremiad we have just heard on the subject of wind power—is not the answer, but it is part of the answer. Those who feel it is a blot on the landscape may do well to read Ruskin on the Monsal Dale railroad and reflect on that as they walk on what is now one of the treasures of the dales. The noble Lord reminded us that other countries—Denmark and Germany—are doing markedly better in this respect. The Committee on Climate Change has had a little study done on how Germany is doing much better than we are in insulating houses. As he said, and as I shall not further elaborate, part of the answer is that Germany has a more interventionist approach—almost shading into a command and control thing—whereas we are still too committed to what Jonathon Porritt, in his vivid prose, would call the fundamentalist neoliberal financial orthodoxy. It has its merits, but there are other ways of getting things done and some things that other countries are doing better. My third example is the one I find most upsetting. We, like other countries in the OECD and elsewhere, have a massive stimulus package, and properly so. However, it is fairly generally agreed that if one rates it as a green package, it can be put generously by saying that it is not in the top half. One specificity that I find frankly incomprehensible was the scrappage package for older cars, the £2,000 intervention to help people trade them in. The CCC promptly suggested that some limit on the grams of carbon per mile should be added. On that topic, the Treasury gave us two fingers. My fourth example is more general and picks up a theme that has already been sounded by the noble Earl, Lord Selborne. Perhaps some noble Lords are not aware that Selborne is a particularly resonant place to be the earl of because the first serious work on ecology is Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne. The noble Earl is a worthy—not genetic—heir of that tradition. My noble friend Lord Krebs, who I more commonly think of as John Krebs, and the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, reminded us that climate change is only part of a gestalt of problems that roil together and are made up of increasing impact per person and increasing numbers of people. It is curious that we are focused on total impact in the UK and have not talked much about numbers of people. This is a more general question globally, and there are uncertainties about that that are not as explicit in the report as I perhaps would have wished. The current population of Britain is 61 million or 62 million. We do not know; most countries do not know to within 1 or 2 per cent what their population is. Projections for 2050 range from a low of high 60 millions or low 70 millions to a high of high 80 millions, and there is even an EU projection that suggests that by 2050 we will have the highest population. This is not me wishing to set an agenda for the BNP, but it is another issue. It has more general implications for educating women in the developing world and in our own country and empowering them to make non-coerced choices about families. Ultimately, our trajectory to the Committee on Climate Change’s 2050 target and to sustainable development more generally depends on us all co-operating nationally and internationally in equitable proportions. Unfortunately, an increasing number of studies and experiments on how people co-operate, such as games played by university students as metaphors for addressing a co-operative phenomenon such as climate change, show how easily, "I will if you will" slides into, "I won’t if you won’t". This, as many noble Lords know, is Darwin’s year, and I have given more lectures than I care to remember on that. My standard Darwin lecture, which I will not inflict on the House, is about Darwin’s great unsolved problem, the remaining puzzle of how we became a co-operative group once we had got bigger than bands of closely related hunter-gatherers. It is a problem that underlies much of the discussion, and it leads me—this is a bit of a leap—to the conclusion that in many ways, given that we have no evolutionary experience of acting today on behalf of a seemingly distant future, voluntary bodies and NGOs are none the less more effective in delivering such things than are the more process-oriented machineries of government. Others have made many requests of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, but my one request is that we give a bit more consideration to distributing some of the money for initiatives to some of these voluntary bodies. The Ashenden Foundation, with which I have no association, made a particularly favourable impression on me. It has an annual awards ceremony in which it has a hierarchy of awards to primary school kids—so you hear six and seven year-olds talking about what they have done to try to sensitise their fellows to being less wasteful—up through secondary school and on to local councils. There is an understanding that if you get one person in a street to make their house more energy-secure, you will generate demand for the whole street. It needs a fairly minimal subsidy to get that kind of ball rolling. This echoes a theme that I went on about at excessive length in the debate on HIV not long ago: how much more effectively we could be acting on sexual health if we gave more of the money to voluntary bodies. My third and final point is that we need to stop thinking about the unwelcome question of the costs of these actions. In the world that we are heading towards, the actions recommended in the climate change committee’s report and accepted by the Government and which will produce the step change, uncomfortable, awkward and difficult though some of them may be, will have net benefits to the UK in energy security, food security and other respects, regardless of whether other countries are shouldering their burden. It will put us ahead of the curve for a future that will be different from the past, and where those who act early will benefit.