I will speak to the Government’s amendments to the Infrastructure Bill and to Amendment 95ZBE in my name. We have had an excellent debate this afternoon. The Labour Party’s commitment to environmental protection is absolutely steadfast. We have an excellent track record of delivering protection for the environment in government. We were the Government that passed the Climate Change Act and the Countryside and Rights of Way Act. We also established the national parks. There should be no doubt about our desire to enhance and protect our environment, and tackle climate change. That said, we do not oppose the extraction of new fossil fuels in this country on principle. However, we will insist that they respect environmental limits at both a local and global level.
I turn to the specific issue of trespass, which these clauses mainly address. They deal with a legal anomaly that was established relatively recently by legal precedent. We believe that this anomaly should be addressed and we do not agree that this somehow takes away a long-established right that people have held dear. It is certain that a legal precedent will be used to hold up the proceeding of geothermal and potentially fracking. People are saying that we need judicial scrutiny of each and every incident of fracking, but that seems to me quite an inefficient and wasteful use of judicial time when we have existing systems for ensuring that these projects go ahead under tight limits.
Equally, I have some sympathy with the numerous civil society groups that have now set themselves in opposition to fracking. My reason is that, unfortunately, this whole issue has been handled so appallingly badly that there is now a deep sense of mistrust and opposition, which is very genuine and heartfelt. Polling shows that as much as a quarter of the population is quite vehemently opposed to fracking, a quarter is supportive and a half does not care, but that first quarter will be vocal and will want to have its voice listened to. The opposition has grown because of the way that this matter has been presented to us. It was offered as a silver bullet to all our energy needs. We were told that this was going to drastically reduce costs and create a huge number of jobs, and that was the basis on which it was promoted.
I was very interested to listen to the Minister’s speech today, which was very different in tone. The emphasis was on energy security and climate change benefits relative to other sorts of fossil fuels. That is very welcome because that is the area where fracking has a role to play in terms of potential security of supply. It is certainly also true to say that, done well with the proper environmental protections, fracking, and fracked gas in particular, can have a significantly lower carbon footprint than imported sources of gas.
I think that there has been a certain amount of overhyping and a certain naive belief that we can look across the Atlantic at what has happened in the US and simply import it here. I am sure that those parallels have been drawn by various people in the Government. That is unfortunate because the US does not have a reputation for strong environmental regulation—quite the opposite. It has also until very recently set itself against action on climate change. Therefore, one can see how the Government saying that we are going to do what the US has done has necessarily upset people and caused them to be deeply suspicious. It is also true that we are in a world where we are trying to take action to tackle climate change, and this is a potential new source of fossil fuel which is being brought to the market and which would otherwise stay in the ground.
Therefore, I understand where the opposition is coming from on this but I do not think that the solution is to hold up this new source of energy through exploitation of an obscure trespass precedent. I think that the answer is to make sure that we have very strong environmental protections and regulations, and a number of the amendments that we have tabled today have been put forward with that precise aim in mind.
Our amendment is part of our attempt to introduce stronger environmental regulations for fracking for geothermal and gas. We will see fugitive emissions from fossil fuel activities but at the moment there is not really a government policy or an environmental approach to such emissions in this country. My noble friend Lord Whitty pointed out that we have been extracting fossil fuels onshore for a couple of centuries and that we have had some experiences. However, relatively speaking, climate change is quite a new thing and fugitive emissions have not been considered to be an issue before. There is of course monitoring of these facilities but mainly from a health and safety perspective. Companies do not like to have obviously dangerous concentrations of methane because it is potentially explosive, which is a health and safety issue and could damage equipment. There is an incentive for them to do that sort of monitoring but there is little incentive to do monitoring that relates to climate change. Our concern is that, overall, if we are going to see this industry develop—and I remain relatively sceptical that it will happen on the scale that some people hope—we should do this firmly in the knowledge that it must be monitored and managed in terms of our climate change targets and carbon budgets.
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I learnt fairly recently over the recess that at the moment the UK has a network of monitoring stations dotted around the country that monitor background levels of greenhouse gases in much the same way that the Mauna Loa facility does in Hawaii. These are used to try to assess whether our inventory of greenhouse gases is accurate. We have a bottom-up inventory that takes the point sources of greenhouse gases and adds them all together. These monitoring stations are used to cross check to see whether we are capturing what we think is happening. It is complex and a lot of mathematics needs to be done to normalise these data but they exist. It is showing, I am told, that we have far higher methane levels in parts per million in the UK than the inventory would imply.
The methane could be coming from a number of sources and I am not saying that it is all coming from the fossil fuel industry, but given that we have this potential anomaly, it is probably not sensible to be embarking on a huge new industry—if indeed it ever becomes that—that is a source of methane without proper management and monitoring. Our amendment would require the Secretary of State to look into this and work with the Committee on Climate Change to assess fugitive emissions and come up with a plan for reporting, monitoring and managing those emissions so that we can have accurate reporting into our inventory and then a management procedure to make sure that we stay within our budgets.
A number of noble Lords have spoken eloquently this afternoon. The noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, made a persuasive case for the exclusion of fracking in protected areas. I began as a campaigner working on the CROW Act, so I am passionate about protecting the jewels in our crown, as the noble Baroness described them. However, we need this industry to be well regulated wherever it occurs, not just in the jewels in our crown. If only 12% to 15% is covered by those
areas, we should not ignore the fact that that leaves 88% that also needs proper protection and for this industry to be properly governed and managed. I am interested to hear the Minister’s response to the arguments put forward by the noble Baroness, which were very strong.
The amendment of my noble friend Lord Whitty raised another interesting issue. The idea of a contingency fund has merit. It is certainly the case that sites have become orphaned in the past and that ownership changes. Some of these companies are not large petrochemical or global energy companies but smaller wildcat companies that may not be around for very long, so there is a risk. This is definitely something that we should explore.
I am always interested to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding. I was particularly interested this afternoon in his excellent and hugely encouraging exposition of the role that geothermal can play. The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, is right. We might see the geothermal industry move forward with much less fanfare but with a more solid basis than fracking. The geothermal provisions are important. This is an exciting source of potential renewable energy, particularly renewable heat. As was mentioned, the renewable heat incentive could put this technology on the map. We could become world leaders in it, which would be nice. It should go without saying, but geothermal is ultimately a source of nuclear energy because it is the radioactive elements in the core of the earth that keep the heat. This is possibly a really efficient, effective and cheap way of doing nuclear power, which we probably need.
I will end there. This is a question of balance. We do not wish to impede activities that can improve our security of supply, but we need this to be done in the context of robust regulation. Unfortunately, I do not think that that is the spirit that has prevailed to date. These amendments address a very narrow aspect of fracking and there is not really anything here from the Government on the environmental aspects. That is regrettable. We have tabled amendments that seek to address that and we will debate those shortly.