Consumer Emissions (Climate Change) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I, too, welcome the Bill put forward by my noble friend. Obviously, and unfortunately, given the parliamentary timetable, it probably will not go forward to the statute book, but it is a welcome addition to the ongoing debate that the 2008 Act did not finish— I would say that it was the beginning of the beginning. There is an interesting point of debate in the Bill, because from talking to a large number of people involved in this area, I know that there is an enormous amount of difference of opinion as to how, what and from where you should measure. The Carbon Trust deals with "whole of life". Other people think that the "polluter pays" principle should be that you measure only the carbon that you actually use. That is a real problem. It stems from the fact that when we talk about the fact that we live in a carbon economy, we make a fundamental assumption that we are talking about cost. Of course, cost and carbon are two completely separate things. We have a trading scheme that is based on cost, but in a carbon economy, all we are saying is that for any action within the carbon economy, a certain amount of CO2 is released into the atmosphere. That is the basis of the Bill. If we take, say, the cost of T-shirts in a supermarket in this country, it can be very low indeed. However, if you take into account the carbon costs of their being made inefficiently in a foreign country and transported half way around the world, the real cost of the cheaper T-shirts might be far higher than the cost indication. We will have to move forward on measuring carbon. We cannot do it on a cost basis; we will have to come up with a baseline that works out how much carbon is associated with every product that we buy. That is an important issue, and one that I have been banging on about for several years. I have a scheme, which I hope to bring to fruition, based on carbon units, which means that services and products would have a carbon label that would indicate how much carbon went into that product. Firms could easily use that system, because all that they would be doing would be measuring the amount of carbon dioxide that they are responsible for and adding it to whoever provided the good to them. That would get around some of the problems of carbon value from overseas. If a good was produced in China, in exactly the same way as the international labour laws work, you would track back and ask the producing company to give you a carbon value for that product before you bought it. It would be an interesting system, because it would indicate to companies that they would have to buy not just on cost but on carbon value, because there would be a risk to their product having a very high carbon value. A classic example of that is cement. Cement can have dramatically different carbon values. A lot of people say that one way that we could measure carbon is by a traffic light system, as we do for food. However, in the same way that the traffic light system for fat does not work for cheese because, unfortunately, cheese is coagulated fat, so it will always be red, it does not matter what type of cheese you use, so cement has a very high carbon value, so it would always be red. However, the difference in the carbon content between two brands of cement can be enormous. That is important, especially if you are using a large amount of cement in the construction of a building. That would deal with one of the real issues that we are trying to address in all our discussions: a change of behaviour. The Bill has set the target of 60 per cent but then—the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, must be given credit for this, because he gave away the mechanism in the 2008 Act—the climate change committee set the target at 80 per cent. We will never meet that 80 per cent target until people start to realise that that is 80 per cent of the carbon that they as individuals, not just we as a country, use. That is a real problem. We cannot do that until we can start to understand how much carbon is associated with all the products and services that we use. Until we have a way to deal with that, it is very difficult for individuals to work out the amount of carbon that they are using. A classic case in point is going through the exercise of carbon footprinting. It is very difficult to take a carbon footprint accurately because there are so many unknowns. That is true even for food, on which I did quite a lot of work. You have to try to work out the carbon value of all the inputs, such as fertiliser. Until last year, there was no company that would give you an accurate reading for the amount of carbon involved in fertiliser, and fertiliser accounts for, we think, 15 per cent of the carbon involved in agriculture. Even if you do a carbon footprint, it is based on assumptions. I believe it will be possible, quite soon, to introduce systems throughout the economy in which companies are asked to produce carbon figures and, when they sell a product or service, to give the carbon value for the next person to add, exactly like VAT, until it goes to the consumer. That will allow anyone making a purchasing agreement to work out the carbon value of the product or service they are buying. It will create a massive change in behaviour. This Bill is useful because it highlights one of the areas about which we have no knowledge. My problem, which the Government will also face, is that we do not, as yet, have the evidence base to achieve some of the reductions we are trying to undertake. Until we put that in place, many of the assumptions that we are making could be wildly inaccurate.