My Lords, I offer my congratulations to the noble Viscount, Lord Montgomery of Alamein, on bringing this Bill before the House, and to Neil Carmichael in the other place. It is a vital Bill. I apologise to the noble Viscount for interrupting his speech and asking about the definition of an environmental emergency. I hope that the Minister will turn his attention to that matter. It is set out in the Bill in Clause 13(3), which states:
“In this Part, ‘environmental emergency’ means an accidental event that results in, or imminently threatens to result in, any significant harmful impact on the environment of Antarctica”.
Why is it limited to an accidental event? Why is “accidental” included in the subsection? Why does the measure not apply to any event that threatens to have a significant harmful impact? I have no doubt there is a simple explanation for that but it was not obvious to me on reading the Bill.
My noble friend Lord Baker reminded me that my right honourable friend the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, first became enthusiastic about the environment
when she was told that a British Antarctic Survey team had discovered the hole in the ozone layer as a result of its work in the Antarctic. That was the origin of her pursuing the environment with the vigour that she did when she was Prime Minister.
As my noble friend Lord Selborne pointed out, I had the pleasure of going to Antarctica at Christmas 2010 to climb the highest mountain there. Almost all noble Lords supported that venture in aid of Marie Curie Cancer Care and we raised almost half a million pounds as a result of that visit. I have to say that it was one of the most expensive trips that I have ever taken anywhere. It is very difficult to get there and the costs and difficulties of operating there are immense.
Having been to Antarctica, I have to confess that I did not see any penguins or any animals at all because I went to the interior to climb a mountain and landed at the Union glacier, where it is so cold that no animals or even bacteria can exist. It is a completely lifeless place. For me, it was a quite astonishing, almost spiritual, experience. If you stand on a mountain in Antarctica on a calm day, which does not happen very often, the air is so clear and unpolluted that you can see for many more miles than we are used to doing in other parts of the globe. The thing that is most striking is the silence. There are no birds or airplanes. You look out on a completely unspoilt environment.
I am not noted as a great champion of rigorous regulation but the Antarctic Treaty has been an absolute triumph, as my noble friend Lord Selborne pointed out. Despite the injunctions of the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, I shall resist the temptation to compare it with European Union treaties. It has indeed been hugely successful. When I went to Antarctica, I was supported by an organisation run by former members of the British Antarctic Survey. We should be really proud of that body and what it has achieved—it has been immensely successful. The people involved are incredibly professional and understanding of what is required to operate in a very harsh and unforgiving environment. A simple mistake can mean the loss of fingers and toes or other vital parts of your body.
The treaty means that, for example, before you can leave Chile to get to Antarctica, you have to be briefed and you have to be aware of a set of rules. I do not wish to be indelicate but one thing that people always ask me about the expedition is: if the temperature is minus 35 degrees and you are in a tent, how do you manage with your ablutions? Under the rules, everything —and I mean everything—has to be carried back to Chile. It has to be put in a bag, frozen and carried back. Under the terms of the treaty, you are not allowed to take anything out of Antarctica and you are not allowed to leave anything behind. The only things that you can leave behind are your footprints, and the only things you can away are your memories and photographs. This is rigorously enforced.
I can hear my noble friend asking why that is. If people were to pee in the snow, there would be a series of yellow ice stacks up the mountain as the snow was blown away due to the katabatic winds. Therefore, strict control is applied right the way through. The result is that, when you go to Mount Vinson, it is as
God left it—it is completely unspoilt. That is in stark contrast to other high mountains in the world such as Everest, Aconcagua or Kilimanjaro, which are completely strewn with rubbish and desperately polluted. The fact that Mount Vinson is unspoilt is entirely due to the operation of this treaty, and therefore I very much welcome the Bill, which takes it further forward.
The other point that I should like to make—this may seem a little hypocritical, having been there—is that when you go to Antarctica you fly from Punta Arenas and land on a natural ice runway in a Russian plane without windows, which is quite a scary experience. As you leave the plane, you immediately find yourself in Narnia: you are confronted with a blinding white light and a completely unspoilt environment. There is a camp there, which has to be set up every year, and it is amazingly well run and organised. Some of the best food and wine that I have eaten and drunk was at Union glacier. When I complained to the organisers that it seemed a bit extravagant to have such splendid claret, he said, “The cost of the claret is incidental. The real cost is getting it here and taking it out again”. Therefore, Union glacier is a very comfortable camp.
We were stuck at the camp for several days while waiting to get out and there were all kinds of people there. The most interesting people were of course the mountaineers. The next most interesting were the scientists. There are scientists involved in all kinds of work—from putting in GPS systems to working out the movements in the ice cap, measuring the effects of climate change and working out how many neutrinos are hitting the earth as part of deep space research. Others are involved in drilling into the ice core to try to establish the record of climate change. Several scientists pointed out to me that those who drill into the ice core occasionally find pockets of gas. That is the key thing: Antarctica is rich in natural resources—gas and rare metals—and therefore it is very important that the treaty protects it because it is indeed a very fragile environment.
Also at the camp were several Russian and one or two American billionaires in their seventies who had flown to the pole in a private aeroplane. The pole has now become a major tourist attraction for very wealthy people. I said to one lady, “Why are you here?”. She replied, “Well, I’ve been to the North Pole and I’ve booked my trip to space, so I thought I ought to come to the South Pole”. Good luck to her, but it seems to me that if this very fragile environment is subject to those kinds of pressures, it will be damaged, and damaged beyond repair.
Therefore, I congratulate the noble Viscount on this Bill. I believe that we have much to be proud of in the part that we have played as Brits in the preservation of this special part of the planet. It remains unspoilt and a natural laboratory from which we can do the necessary work in order to pass on to the next generation a world that is better than the one we inherited.
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