Climate Change: Carbon Budgets

My Lords, in thanking the Minister for introducing this debate, it is only natural that I, like everybody else, should pay tribute to the Committee on Climate Change which has generated the report that is the background to all that we have heard. As always when I take part in one of these debates, I am impressed by the breadth and depth of experience which constantly confirms my feeling of privilege to be a Member of this House. Even my noble friend Lord Reay, whose contribution and approach to the subject are totally opposed to mine, made an important point. He drew attention to the vulnerability of our energy supplies in this country at this time, due in no small part to the dilatoriness of the Government over the past decade. That said, we have a very serious subject to debate today. I want to step back from the report for a few minutes in order to look at the background in a bit more depth. The problem which the report addresses on a purely national level, as so many other noble Lords have said, is part of a very great international problem. In the end, every other country in the world must face the issues that we face today. Even those countries in the less developed world, which think that the whole problem is the problem of the developed world—and to a certain extent it is—cannot solve their problems and aspirations today without taking the same sort of steps that we will have to take. If they do not, climate change will not be arrested if, as we in the developed world run down our greenhouse gas emissions, countries in the less developed world simply increase theirs. That is not a solution: it is a recipe for a continuing risk of disaster. The implication that lies behind this is that the technological answers that we find have to be capable of development across the globe: if they are economic here they will be economic across the globe, and if they are not economic here they will not be economic across the globe. I will return to that point in a little while. My second point is one that the Minister has touched on already, although very indirectly, when he said that we would have a debate some time in the new year on the implications for 2050. The focus of the report, quite naturally, is where we are now, what we can do now and the start of the process. The focus is inevitably short because there is too much consideration, in my view, of 2020 issues which have been established as a target by the European Community. But the critical target for this country and across the globe is the 2050 target, which might suggest some rather different, more radical approaches from anything we are doing at present. I have said before that the shape of the 2050 economy can already be predicted in broad scope. By then, our 80 per cent reduction on 1990 levels implies, quite clearly, that only essential emissions will be acceptable after that date—emissions that can otherwise not be avoided. One could begin to list them. I declare an interest as a farmer, because agriculture is essential if we are to maintain our food production. We cannot do without livestock, and regrettably, that means greenhouse gases. We cannot do without the smelting industries that provide our metals, nor cement manufacture. I suspect that we cannot do without aviation and shipping although those can, like every other aspect of the economy, become more energy efficient. That implies that the whole of the domestic sector, the whole of our industrial and commercial sectors and the whole of our land-based transport sector have to have zero emissions. We need to think about the technologies that will make that possible. The noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, thinks a great deal—and I have every sympathy with him—about anaerobic digestion producing gas, but that is but a step in the process. The gas can be used to produce electricity and post-2050 electricity will be the energy source that we use almost universally. There is a question mark over road transport, which I will not go into now because I have before. That is the background to where we are. One of the step changes we need to make is to stop looking at the 2020 targets and look very seriously at the 2050 target and the international implications of that. We should not overcomplicate the issue. I hear so much about what needs to be done in the domestic sector. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors has said that if you want to produce a top-quality energy-efficient house, the additional cost of doing so is £17,000 on the average home. But we have 23 million existing houses that have to be adapted and the cost of doing that is probably not that dissimilar if you are to do it to the highest quality. But I can make my home zero emission very simply for far less. All I have to do is use immersion heaters for my hot water system, put space heaters in my rooms and cook with electricity and my home has zero emissions. That might cost me £2,500. Of course, that depends on my electricity supplier being emissions free, but we will have to make the electricity supply industry emissions free anyway. I wonder whether we should not focus our finance and resources entirely on making sure that that is what happens and not worry quite so much about the domestic consumer. The domestic consumer already has responsibility for the energy efficiency of his own home and will have to make his own decisions. There was a time when I was responsible for the whole of the built estate for Essex County Council and a major consideration was the question of energy efficiency. Energy projects went in and out of programmes with amazing rapidity depending on the wildly fluctuating state of the then economy. We need to recognise that the important thing is that the decision to invest—and energy efficiency is an investment—belongs to the property holder and property owner and we should not take it away from him. I have two questions for the Minister. One is almost a complete digression, but it has an important aspect to it. First, nuclear power is at the moment the only greenhouse gas-free energy source that we have in this country that is not dependent on the weather, which is an important criterion. Can the Minister give us any encouragement about the position of applicants with planning applications for nuclear power stations coming forward so that once the planning policy statement is approved and the planning commission is at work, there will be applications immediately for consideration? Going back to what was said by my noble friend Lord Reay, that work should really have been done last week. My second question is slightly different and not intended as a red herring. Under the European Commission’s environmental directives, if one interferes with an environmentally sensitive directive of major international importance, one has an obligation to replace the interfered-with assets as part of the project. The greatest difficulty with this process arises particularly in relation to the Severn barrage—the Severn estuary being the second most powerful potential electricity generator at the moment. We may not see how to undertake that scheme at present, but the time may well come when we can. We need to bear in mind that if we fail on the climate change initiative in toto, the Severn estuary will be ruined anyway, by rising sea levels and rising temperatures. Would it be worth approaching the European Commission for a derogation from the obligation to replace environmental assets where necessary in order to prevent the catastrophic change that is possible if we do not get the environment under control?