My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 40 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington—I hope I can refer to her as my noble friend. I have done so in solidarity with her and in acknowledgement of her dexterity and expertise in handling the excesses of the oil and gas sector, rather than from a steadfast conviction that the carbon take-back scheme is the deterrent needed to curtail the enthusiasm of the financial markets in their continuing and increasing support for the sector.
I want to find out more about the scheme and to raise some questions posed by it. I get that this novel scheme is cleverly devised, accounting for not just the carbon neutrality of the production of fossil fuels but their deployment, subsequent combustion and release into the atmosphere as greenhouse gases. I support that, but I also have concerns.
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Hydrocarbons from fossil fuels are responsible not just for greenhouse gases but for the synthetic plastics that are poisoning our oceans and the for ever chemicals that accumulate even in the most pristine environments remaining to us. For ever chemicals are a class of chemicals known collectively as per and polyfluorinated alkyl substances or PFAS—a family of thousands of human-made substances that never break down in the environment. They are ubiquitous—in food packaging, cosmetics, cookware, waterproof clothing, carpets, mattresses, electronics, firefighting foam retardants, et cetera.
We talk about climate change and chemical exposure as two separate issues, but we really should start thinking about them together as one. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, raised this in another amendment. My concern is that, as we move away from fossil fuel combustion and towards renewable energy, the oil and gas industry will pivot even more towards turning its products into poisonous plastics and synthetic chemicals, which are very profitable. The industry has shown time and again how impervious it is to the fact that these products are toxic and do irreparable damage to the only planet we have.
My instinct says that the best place for fossil fuels is in the ground, out of harm’s way. Any system that perpetuates their production must also ensure that we bear down meaningfully on reducing their production.
Only the hardest-to-abate residual emissions would be captured and locked away, and I hope the industry will pay for it. With that proviso, ultimately I support this amendment because I too want to see carbon capture and storage a reality. It may well be that DAC—direct air capture—will be necessary to stop runaway climate change. It seems right that storage facilities should be developed and paid for by the companies that made it necessary.