I am normally a loyal Back Bencher. I sometimes skip merrily through the Division Lobbies behind my leaders, and at other times go through those Lobbies with a slightly heavier heart. I am afraid that this will be one of the occasions on which I back the Government, but do so with a certain amount of trepidation.
I listened with great interest to the Minister’s explanation of how he would reduce electricity demand, but one of the most important questions that can be asked from these Benches is not “how”, but “why”. Why is it necessary to do this in the first place? The Minister gave us a bit of an explanation by referring to climate change, which he described as a clear and present danger. Of course it is a clear and present danger. No one whom I know of has denied the reality of climate change, and I have certainly never done so. The point is that the climate has always been changing. That has been a clear and present danger for the last 4.5 billion years. The new clause, and indeed the entire Bill, were tabled on the basis that the 0.8° rise that we have seen over the last 300 years is somehow more of a danger than any of the other rises and falls that we have seen over the last 4.5 billion years.
I did a bit of scribbling as I was sitting here and listening with interest, and I worked something out. I have seen many graphs in the documents backing up these claims, and if we had a graph that showed every 100 years as 1 cm, in order to show how long the earth had been in existence, the graph would have to be 280 miles long, which is twice the length of the High Speed 2 rail route. If we really did have a graph that was that long and we were going to look at just 3 cm of it, would it be wise to put forward such far-reaching amendments and Bills based on changes that are not that far out of the ordinary over the course of the 280 miles that my imaginary graph stretches?