Climate Agenda

Thursday 24th October 2024 Lords Chamber

Motion to Take Note

11:50

Moved by

[Lord Lilley]

That this House takes note of the impact of His Majesty’s Government’s climate agenda on jobs, growth and prosperity.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great and somewhat unexpected privilege to open this debate. I particularly look forward to the maiden speech of my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead. It is fitting that her first contribution should be to this debate, since the net-zero commitment is very much her personal legacy. It also gives me a chance to thank her for what she and your Lordships may feel was a less wise part of her legacy, which was nominating me to this House.

It is hard to overstate how crucial cheap energy is for economic growth and prosperity. The quadrupling of oil prices in 1974 ended three decades of rapid growth in western economies. Energy price rises have invariably been followed by a slowdown in growth. On the other hand, thanks to shale oil and gas in America, that country has had cheaper energy and grown faster than other western economies, and China’s extraordinary growth has been fuelled by cheap coal.

Let me start with a few facts about climate change and the climate agenda impacts. First, Britain has reduced its territorial emissions of CO₂ more than any other major economy and they are now back to the level they were in 1879. Secondly, Britain has more offshore wind power than any other country bar China, not to mention its onshore wind, solar and bio energy.

Thirdly, despite or because of this, British industry pays the highest electricity prices in Europe. They doubled in real terms over the two decades up to the start of the Ukraine war, even though real gas prices remained largely unchanged over that period.

Fourthly, we have already lost most of our aluminium industry and are losing our primary steel-making capacity and, with it, thousands of jobs. We are seeing the Grangemouth refinery turning into an import terminal and other British refineries under threat. We import an increasing proportion of energy-intensive goods, such as cement and bricks.

Fifthly, when our manufacturing industry moves abroad, it does not reduce global emissions at all—far from it. We now import many carbon-intensive products, so the reduction in Britain’s carbon footprint is only 36%, much less than the near halving of our reported territorial emissions.

Finally, the Government propose to accelerate the move to net zero regardless of cost, to prevent new North Sea exploration and instead import oil and gas, and to ignore or deny the impact this will have on our energy costs, growth and jobs.

This is an unusually significant debate because, as far as I can tell, it is the first time that Parliament has formally debated the impact on jobs, growth and prosperity of our decision to decarbonise our economy. Our failure to do so has been part of a collective institutional failure by Governments of all parties, both Houses of Parliament, the BBC, the Climate Change Committee and other public bodies to permit or promote an informed debate on the economic costs and benefits of net zero.

Costs were never discussed during the passage of the Climate Change Act in 2008, nor during the 90-minute debate committing us to net zero in 2019. It is extraordinary that we still have no official cost-benefit analysis of net zero, five years after embarking on the project.

Long ago, our national broadcaster formally decided not to give airtime to any views that might undermine public support for net zero. I discovered this when expressing doubts not about the science of global warming, which is rock solid, but about its scale and impact. The BBC published an apology “for giving voice to Peter Lilley”, removed the offending programme from the BBC iPlayer lest other people hear my voice, sent the producers on a re-education course and banished me from their studios on this issue ever since. Now my absence is no great loss to me or the nation, but our national broadcaster’s refusal to allow serious debate on the costs of the most expensive commitment since the welfare state is a travesty.

The most egregious failure has been that of the Climate Change Committee, which should have provided unbiased estimates of costs for public debate. I am glad that my noble friend Lord Deben will be able to explain why it has refused to do so. It even spent large sums of taxpayers’ money resisting a freedom of information request for details of its forecast that net zero would cost the nation 1% to 2% of GDP by 2050. Many assumed that this was the cost of getting to net zero but, actually, this is the cost we will face after 2050 once we have eliminated our emissions. The CCC has not calculated the cost of getting there; maybe its forecasting instrument is like one of those telescopes that can focus with great clarity on distant objects but renders anything near at hand a blurred and fuzzy image. There seems to be no other reason for not giving us the costs of getting to 2050.

The CCC’s reluctance to publish its workings was perhaps understandable given that it was so optimistic but, as it turns out, that is true of estimates produced by most public bodies. Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith—the lead author of the Royal Society’s report on the cost of large-scale electricity storage—recently pointed out that all official estimates were grossly optimistic, and he was honest enough to include his own, by the Royal Society. It is sad that we do not have the information on which we can have an honest and informed debate.

True believers in net zero are reluctant to discuss its costs because they have convinced themselves that there are none. It will give us cheap energy and boost growth by creating new jobs in new industries, exporting clean technologies worldwide, making the world greener and ourselves richer. How wonderful if that were true. There is an old saying that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is not true. I hope that wind power, in particular, because we have lots of it, will one day be cheaper than fossil fuels, but it patently is not yet. If wind and solar are cheaper, why have our electricity prices doubled as they have replaced fossil fuels? If renewables are cheaper, why is our electricity more expensive than in other European countries, which have less than us? If renewables are cheaper, why do they need subsidy?

Apologists say that those are the costs of old technologies and that the costs are coming down. The first part is true, although it is a shame they did not tell us at the time. Dieter Helm has calculated that Britain wasted up to £100 billion by investing prematurely in immature technology, rather than waiting until it was cost effective.

The Secretary of State assured us last month that, on the basis of recent auctions, renewables are the cheapest form of power to build and operate. Unfortunately, that is simply not true. The latest auction price for offshore wind was £82 per megawatt hour in today’s money, whereas his own department’s figures—for reference, on page 24 of the Electricity Generation Costs 2023 document—put the cost to build and operate a new gas plant at less than £60 per megawatt hour. Does the Secretary of State repudiate his own departmental figures?

Moreover, this is only half the story, because the comparison is not like for like. Wind is intermittent, and Dieter Helm advised the Government that, to make a true comparison, the costs of wind should include the cost of back-up generators or storage. Electricity that is not there when you want it is less valuable than electricity that is.

My economics lecturer taught us this by the old fable of the two New York bakers. One advertised bagels at 50 cents each, the other opposite at a dollar. A customer went to the cheaper baker and asked for a bagel. “Sorry, we’re out of bagels”, he was told. So he went to the other store and asked if they had any bagels. When the shopkeeper gave him one and charged him a dollar, he protested, “But the shop opposite only charges 50 cents a bagel”. “Well, why didn’t you go there?” “I did, but he’s out of bagels just now”. To which the other shopkeeper replied, “When I’m out of bagels, I only charge 50 cents”. Wind may be as cheap as other things when it is available, but it is a lot more expensive when it is not.

Electricity when it is not there when you want it is less valuable electricity, so you need back-up gas plants or storage. Back-up gas plants are doubly expensive because they can operate only when the wind is not blowing and they in turn need carbon capture and storage, which, even if it can be made to work with gas-fired stations, which it has not yet, will add further costs—again doubly so, because it will operate only part-time.

The second leg of the too good to be true story is that if we plough ahead with decarbonising our economy supply, we will enrich ourselves by generating new export industries. The Industry Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Vallance, who pursued the Sue Gray route to the upper echelons of the Labour Party, was given a little section of his own in the Labour manifesto, in which he said that

“by accelerating the transition to clean, homegrown energy”

we will not only

“end the era of high energy bills”

but be

“helping ourselves and exporting our solutions worldwide. But if we choose to go slowly, others will provide the answers, and ultimately we’ll end up buying these solutions rather than selling them”.

Where has he been for the past 20 years? Far from choosing to go slowly, we have outpaced other countries, but we have had to buy the solutions from abroad. Imports of renewable technologies vastly exceed our exports. Foreign suppliers have finally begun to make wind vanes in this country and assemble generators here, which is welcome, but they are largely for our fields, and those companies are not going to make us an exporter. The only turbines we export are gas turbines, which we are phasing out and urging others to do likewise. The only area where we might take the lead in developing a new industry is small nuclear, which I persuaded the Energy and Climate Change Committee to back a decade ago. I hope this Government will give that project more welly than my Government did.

An honest appraisal of the cost of net zero will conclude that it is bound to be costly. That does not necessarily mean that we should abandon it. If the costs are less than the likely benefits to the world in reducing the impact of global warming, it is worth the world bearing those costs. Of course, Britain’s contribution to global emissions is very small—less than 1%—so our impact alone is negligible. I accept that we must be prepared to make our proportionate contribution to that collective effort.

I know that many noble Lords believe that we should lead the world by going further and faster in that direction. I confess that I have always found the idea that we can lead the world somewhat hubristic—a hangover from our imperial past. So far, the big emitters —China, India and, in future, Africa and Latin America —have made it clear that they do not give a damn what we do. The one thing that we can be sure of is that if we impose such costs on our economy that we self-harm and reduce our emissions by exporting our industry abroad, other countries will take note, learn the lessons from our folly and make sure that they do not follow our lead.

I hope that we can now have an honest, frank, well-informed debate comparing the costs of action with the benefits of action. I am sure that will be a point that my bishop, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans, will make in due course since, although we may not agree on this issue, we agree on the importance of honesty. We can have an honest debate only if it is well informed and if we stop trying to convince ourselves that fairy tales are true. I beg to move.

12:04

[Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)]

I welcome this debate and look forward to the other speakers and the debate that will take place between them. In particular, I look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady May of Maidenhead.

I will not pursue the specific points that were made in the introductory speech. I will use the limited time available to me to highlight some excellent and important work that has been undertaken on climate change by the actuarial profession. I declare my interest as a member of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries as entered in the register. Climate change is an issue to which actuaries are devoting increasing attention. What happens in the future is intrinsic to the work of actuaries, hence the risks inherent in climate change are an essential element in the work that we do. It is already built into our professional standards. We are, in an important sense, risk scientists, able to uncover uncomfortable possibilities involving the risks we face, to which mainstream debates struggle to give sufficient weight.

I do not have enough time to go through all the arguments, but I trust my noble friend the Minister will follow up the information and perhaps even organise a meeting at which they can be explored at greater length. In summary, work undertaken by the profession in the report it produced last year, The Emperor’s New Climate Scenarios, identified that many of the models used to predict economic damage from the hothouse world we face have been too optimistic. Actuaries are saying that the models are not sufficiently accurate for us to place sufficient weight on them. They underestimate the rate at which the Earth is warming, hence carbon budgets based on those estimates are no longer applicable.

More recent work by the profession has identified how close we are to the risk of real problems and how they should be taken into account when making our decisions on policy. The key document here is the institute’s report from March this year, written in conjunction with Exeter University, Climate Scorpion—The Sting is in the Tail. The point made in the title is that the models currently used fail adequately to take into account what are called “tail risks”: the problems that appear towards the end of the period that is being assessed. The risky outcomes of climate change are those in the tail end of the models that are being used.

In short, the message is that we need to give greater weight in our assessment to worst-case scenarios. They need to be taken into account when making policy on climate change. This is essential, given our growing yet precarious lack of knowledge about extreme climate risk and, crucially, the range of tipping points that we face. For example, we have to treat the 1.5 degrees centigrade limit as a physical limit, not a political target. Too often the long-term impacts of climate change are described in terms of central estimates, when rule number one of risk assessment is to focus on the worst case. This subsequent note by actuaries makes it clear, first, that current energy policies are not sufficient to meet the Paris Agreement goals, that an overshoot of the 1.5 degrees centigrade threshold is now more likely than in the past, and that the rate of global warming was accelerating in 2023. In fact, the rate of acceleration was accelerating. We are going faster towards these tipping point risks.

Secondly, there are material risks associated with a failure to meet those goals, with the risk of triggering multiple climate tipping points and a potential tipping cascade. We must understand that a failure to meet the target does not mean that things will be a bit worse; we must take more seriously the fact that passing one of the tipping points will result in catastrophe.

I am therefore concerned about the Answer that my noble friend the Minister gave yesterday to the Written Question from the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, referring to AMOC, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation; at school we may have referred to it as the Gulf Stream drift, but it is now AMOC. The collapse of AMOC undoubtedly presents existential—an overused word, but in this case it is meaningful—risks to food production and water availability. Saying “It’s okay so far, and there are a range of views” is not an adequate response to the risks that we face.

The actuarial profession is taking these risks seriously. There are reports by practitioners who understand the nature of risks and how to adapt policy to those risks. I hope the Government will accept the information they are being provided with and adapt their policies to reflect these new dangers.

12:11

[Lord Browne of Madingley (CB)]

My Lords, I refer the House to my interests as set out in the register, specifically my chairmanship of BeyondNetZero, of Carbonplace and of the board of Equatic, and my membership of the board of the Institute for Carbon Management at the University of California, Los Angeles. I also refer noble Lords to my co-chairmanship of the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology. I very much look forward to hearing the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady May of Maidenhead, in this debate. Meanwhile, I will make four short points.

First, targeted investment in net zero will encourage rather than hinder economic growth, and for that reason it is worth pursuing. The market opportunities are sizeable and, importantly, the UK labour market possesses the relevant skills to grow climate-related activity at scale. We are fortunate to have world-class research scientists and academics at the cutting edge of climate and energy technologies. Structures such as the Faraday Institution, the UK’s flagship institute for electrochemical energy research and development, show what is possible when industry partners are involved, working together with the innovators on projects with real commercial potential. We probably have 50% of the technologies that we need to get to net zero, but we also have universities such as Cambridge that are awash with groups that have the potential to take discovery science, incubate it and prepare it for the commercial markets at the scale that we need not just in the UK but also in the world. There is a wealth of engineering and technical expertise among those who have spent decades working in my old industry, oil and gas, that can now be deployed in the wind, solar, nuclear and other energy sectors.

Secondly, the Government’s commitment to net zero must be reflected in consistent policy approaches. Whatever the rationale at the time, the previous Government’s announcement that they would delay banning the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by five years to 2035 was counterproductive. It sent mixed messages to investors, and electric vehicle supply chains were heavily damaged. Supply was disrupted and consumer confidence suffered. The new Government’s green energy mission, the establishment of Great British Energy and the convening of solar and wind task forces are all encouraging but they cannot simply be strong statements of intent; they must be accompanied by vehicles for focused delivery. For that, the private sector must be invited to the table and provided with incentives to invest and scale its operations even further.

This brings me to my third point: incentives and private sector investment. Incentives are the result of pricing externalities, something that we must tackle head on if we are to achieve the necessary climate correction. For example, the carbon released by one actor but affecting another must be priced and paid for. Incentives to release less carbon or to avoid emissions altogether then follow. Governments are well placed to introduce incentives of this kind or preferential tax regimes, but they must be accompanied by substantial levels of private investment if the national energy transition is to be delivered and the necessary climate technologies commercialised and, importantly, scaled. Governments can set the regulatory environment to encourage investment and in some cases they can lean in, providing incentives or concessionary finance, but they cannot be expected to deliver. The UK continues to lead the world as a wellspring of sustainable finance in the form of venture capital, private equity and large-scale institutional investors. The success of the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States is a case in point.

Fourthly, we must now pick up the pace. The direction and quality of investment flow are eminently predictable if the surrounding conditions are known and controlled. This is the story of economic growth in all sectors, perhaps most notably in the extraction and burning of hydrocarbons over centuries past in this country. There is no reason to believe that it will not continue to be true in the story of our new energy and climate revolution. I am very optimistic, and progress is picking up, but the missing element is time. In my opinion we are approximately 25 years behind, so we must accelerate the rollout of incentives, financing and R&D breakthroughs. This country is well placed to do just that.

12:17

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, for securing this important debate. I am looking forward very much to the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady May, who I know will bring great insight and experience to your Lordships’ House. I declare my interest as president of the Rural Coalition.

We need to take climate change extremely seriously. I commend the previous Government, and indeed some of the plans of the present Administration, for the steps they have taken and are taking. I support the plea by the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, for open and transparent costs of net zero so that we can make informed choices; that seems fundamental to all that we do in every part of our work. Other noble Lords will be able to speak in a more informed way than I can about the positive impact that net zero can have on the economy, not least in terms of jobs in new and emerging sectors such as renewable energy. It will also offset the negative economic impacts that climate change brings with it, such as droughts, pollution and ill health.

I shall limit my comments to quite a focused area: the use of land and, in particular, working with our farmers. Farmers are acutely attuned to changes in weather and therefore to the impact of climate change. They do not have a choice; their whole livelihood depends on it. Some of the increasingly extreme weather that we have seen over recent years, with record windfall and subsequent flooding alongside periods of extreme heat, has hit farmers very hard. I outlined to your Lordships’ House a few weeks ago the devastation and economic costs dealt to farmers recently in the wake of extreme flooding. I remind the House that, last winter, parts of the UK experienced double the level of the monthly rainfall totals of the period that were experienced between 1991 and 2020.

Farmers, as stewards of so much of our land, are uniquely placed to play an important role in helping to achieve His Majesty’s Government’s climate change agenda through nature recovery, sustainable food production and clean energy supply. There is a real opportunity here to have our agricultural industry set a leading example of how economic growth, food security and new energy technologies can work together as a force for good in responding to the environmental challenges we face. I urge the Minister to ensure that farmers are treated as crucial partners in pursuing the climate change agenda; that they are listened to and supported as the burden of demands made on them continues to increase.

In one of the counties in which I am privileged to serve, Hertfordshire, we have some of the most innovative and forward-looking farmers in the whole world. They are right at the cutting edge of how we are going to face the challenges of food production, food security and net zero. What they are asking for, of course, is a level playing field in the international markets and, as any future trade agreements are brokered, their concern is that they should not be disadvantaged in any way. In light of the urgent need to safeguard our environment and to make the Government’s aims for food security, energy security and net zero a reality, the Government must provide a renewed and improved agricultural budget of at least £4 billion a year, which is what the NFU has been calling for, so that farmers can play their part in what is required.

British farmers already own or host about 70% of the UK’s total solar generation capacity, whether on the rooftops of farm buildings or in solar farms. Many food producers also host on-farm wind power. They have a clear role to play in the Government’s commitment to making the UK a clean energy superpower, but it is important that this is balanced with protecting the best agricultural land for food production. It was only a couple of years ago that we saw the invasion of Ukraine having an immediate impact on the cost of food and fertilisers. It was really impacting upon us, so food security is not some optional thing; it is absolutely fundamental to us as a nation.

While rooftop installations offer an ideal platform for renewables, I urge the Government to ensure that those, along with brownfield sites, are prioritised for mounting solar farms, rather than using the most productive agricultural land, which we must protect for our food production. I seek assurances from the Minister that he will do all he can on this front to ensure that these principles are enshrined in the forthcoming land use framework.

12:22

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

My Lords, I very much welcome my noble friend Lord Lilley’s speech and congratulate him on calling this debate, because climate change is a challenge that we need to face, especially those of us who believe in an open, free-market economy. We have to accept that, historically, our free and open economies have operated without properly acknowledging the external costs created by the energy that we were using, exactly as the noble Lord, Lord Browne, said. We need to move to honest prices that fully reflect the costs of carbon emissions as part of a belief in a functioning market economy.

If we go through this process, we will end up with a system with enormous benefits: with greater security of supply, with much less exposure to the risks of volatile gas prices and indeed, in many cases, with lower operational costs, particularly for people driving motor vehicles. The costs of adjustment are indeed high. We absolutely need rigorous economic analysis of what those costs are and who bears them. At the Resolution Foundation—I declare an interest as president —we absolutely try to apply economic analysis to those costs.

I am delighted that this is a debate where we will be hearing the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady May of Maidenhead. One reason, of course, is that she took a lead in committing Britain to a net-zero target. But, if I may say so, there is a second reason as well: she also took a lead in focusing on the living standards of people who were just about managing—people who were struggling to make ends meet. She reminded us that concern about those living standards should be a cross-party issue and not the prerogative of any one party. This debate is an opportunity to combine our concern about the challenge of climate change with a recognition that the costs of adjustment must be borne fairly.

Some of these issues are most acute in the transport sector, which I would like to touch on in particular. This is not an area where we have made massive progress. Transport emissions of carbon dioxide are now greater than they were in 1990. The problem is getting worse, not better. In large part these emissions are associated with car use—over 80% of journeys are still taken by motor car—but it is also where the gains from successful adjustment are massive, with hundreds of billions of pounds of savings when we move to fundamentally lower-cost electric vehicles, powered by clean energy. At the moment, the cost of buying these vehicles is still too high while the benefits, once you have one, can be very low. I would be interested to hear from the Minister what the Government’s plans are to improve the regime for electric vehicles.

For a start, if you are able to charge your electric vehicle at home—in a private driveway or whatever—the costs of charging are only half those faced by less affluent people who are having to charge their cars on the street. This gap in pricing is a major problem. We need to improve the planning regime, so that on-street charging becomes cheaper and quicker, and we need greater competition. I hope the Minister will be able to tell us what plans the Government have to narrow the gap between the costs of on-street and off-street charging, which is now very substantial.

We have historically been rewarding the purchase of electric cars with a very favourable tax regime. These benefits have largely gone to affluent people buying them. That is where innovation starts; they were initially very high cost and it was understandable that the driver of the change would come from the people who could afford expensive electric vehicles. But as the costs fall, will the Government accept that it is no longer necessary to have such expensive subsidies and rewards for the costs of buying an electric vehicle, and instead put more support into holding down the costs for people charging them?

Briefly, another area of transport where we face serious challenges is flying. The growth of emissions from jet flights means that we will soon be seeing them as the biggest single contributor to carbon emissions in the transport sector. There is another uncomfortable fact about the distribution of the costs of adjusting to climate change and the inability, at the moment, fully to cover those costs. It is very likely that the emissions simply from the jet travel of the most affluent 20% of people in this country will be greater than the total emissions incurred by the least affluent 20% from heating their houses, using transport and any other costs. Yet jet travel is an area where we are still not properly covering the costs of the carbon that we emit. Is that not an area for radical progress?

At the end of the day, I think we will end up with fantastic opportunities for Britain; the economic analysis is pretty compelling on this. This will be not because of fantasies about being world-leading, and certainly not by ignoring the economic costs, but by investing in technologies and our natural advantages, with wind and offshore power, tidal power and small modular reactors. We can then have a more efficient economy and a more equitable one as well.

12:28

[Baroness May of Maidenhead (Con) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, it is a huge privilege to be standing here in this place to make my maiden speech. In doing so, I refer your Lordships to my entry in the register of interests, in particular my chairmanship of the Aldersgate Group, a not-for-profit which deals with climate change and environment matters, and of the Global Commission on Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking.

I stand here feeling the privilege of being in this place, but also with a sense of trepidation. People outside this House have said to me, “Don’t worry—you were a Member of Parliament for Maidenhead for 27 years. It’ll be all right. You’ll know what the ropes are—you’ll know the rules”, and I say, “No, this is a very different place”. When they ask how, I say, “Well, for a start, their Lordships normally speak only when they know what they’re talking about”. I will endeavour to follow that rule in my contributions in this place.

I thank all those who have welcomed me and eased my transition: the staff of the House, Black Rod and her staff, the doorkeepers, the clerks, the Lord Speaker’s office and the catering department, which provided a wonderful lunch after my introduction. I thank the security staff and others who have helped and guided me when they have found me wandering aimlessly along a corridor. I thank my two supporters on my introduction, my noble friends Lord True and Lady Evans of Bowes Park.

I also thank my mentor, my noble friend Lady Goldie. I hope she will not mind if I tell the story of the day of my introduction. I was standing in the Moses Room with my supporters, waiting to process into the Chamber, and my noble friend turned up with a very large envelope for me. My supporters indicated how generous it was of her to give me a gift. She said, “It’s the Companion to the Standing Orders to read during recess”. I have not yet been tested on it, but I thank my noble friend for the help and support she has given me, not just recently but over many years.

It is a great pleasure to be speaking in a debate on climate change. I thank my noble friend Lord Lilley for initiating this debate but recognise that there may be some differences of opinion across the House on this issue. I view with deep concern the changes in our climate recently; 2023 was the hottest year in human history. Without action, we will see the frequency and severity of extreme weather events accelerating. The Amazon rainforest will become a carbon source, not a carbon sink. Some of those countries currently sitting around the Commonwealth Heads of Government table will simply cease to exist.

But I believe that there is good news and that we can reap economic benefit from dealing with climate change. The net zero review of 2023 indicated that dealing with the transition from fossil fuels to sustainability was the growth opportunity of the 21st century, estimating that we could see nearly half a million new green jobs here in the UK by 2030. McKinsey has estimated that dealing with providing goods and services for the global net-zero transition could bring £1 trillion to the UK economy by 2030.

I also believe there is a cost of inaction. As just one example, the Green Finance Institute has estimated that the degradation of our environment linked to climate could lead to a loss of 12% of our GDP. I also think that, if we look at this debate just as a matter of who has the biggest sterling figure on their side of the argument, we are missing something. There is a real human cost to climate change.

When extreme weather destroys homes and livelihoods, harvests fail and water supplies dry up, people are driven to destitution and desperation. In that destitution and desperation lies vulnerability, and particularly vulnerability to modern slavery and human trafficking. If the agriculture in a community fails year on year, parents are more likely to take the difficult, heartbreaking decision to let their sons and daughters move or be taken away to the promise of a better life—but in fact taken into slavery, forced into work from which they cannot escape, their freedom and human dignity cruelly taken from them. I believe that is an issue we simply cannot and must not ignore.

In looking at and dealing with climate change, I believe there is an economic benefit. It can bring jobs and prosperity, but it can also help us reduce vulnerability to modern slavery and human trafficking. I urge the Government and all across this House to recognise the need to deal with climate change to save our planet and to save our humanity.

12:34

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to be the first to commend the moving and compelling speech of my noble friend, and my former Member of Parliament. How appropriate that it should be made on the subject of climate change where, as we have heard, my noble friend ensured her legacy by making the UK the first major economy to enshrine in law a net-zero carbon target. She also accelerated progress internationally, cementing our credentials as an ambitious and reliable climate change partner. My noble friend is particularly welcome in your Lordships’ House because, as Prime Minister, she responded to the Burns committee report by exercising restraint in new appointments, unlike the generosity of her immediate successor.

Our paths first crossed nearly 30 years ago when Maidenhead Conservatives were choosing a new candidate. My seat in London had been abolished, and I fancied my prospects in this newly created constituency. My family had lived in it for more than 200 years, my wife had been on the local council, my children had been to the local comprehensive and I was in the Cabinet. The selection committee threw me out in the first round and chose instead an unknown councillor from Merton.

My noble friend became a great local MP, dominating the pages of the Maidenhead Advertiser every Friday and surprising constituents between elections by knocking on their doors on a Saturday morning to ask what they thought of the train service to Paddington. She did that even when she was Prime Minister. No cause was too small to generate her support—literally, as she came to Cookham last year to celebrate the return of the water vole to the banks of the River Thames.

My noble friend was on the Front Bench from 2001, becoming the longest-serving Home Secretary for 60 years and then becoming leader and Prime Minister in 2016, without the necessity of asking party members—not the most reliable of electorates. She generously invited me to join her Administration and retained my services throughout, unlike her predecessor who sacked me not once but twice.

My noble friend led the country with patience at a time of maximum turbulence in her party at the other end, which treated her badly. In retrospect, Parliament should have backed her proposals on Brexit, as the country would have had a better deal than the one we ended up with.

Along with the net-zero commitments, my noble friend will be remembered for the Modern Slavery Act. She is pursuing that cause by leading the Global Commission on Modern Slavery & Human Trafficking, focusing on the impact of climate change on population movement.

Throughout her public life, my noble friend has demonstrated decency, integrity, courage and selflessness. Before we heard of the Nolan principles, she embodied them. In her book The Abuse of Power, she poses this question: “Does politics attract people who yearn for power, rather than for the opportunity to serve?”. For my noble friend, there is no shadow of doubt about the answer. We warmly welcome her to the House and look forward to her future contributions.

Turning to my noble friend Lord Lilley’s Motion, I will make just one point as I have used most of my available time. My noble friend invites us to take note of

“the impact of His Majesty’s Government’s climate agenda on jobs, growth and prosperity”,

but he is choosing his own criteria. Without pressing the analogy too closely, but just to make a point, what would have been the reaction of your Lordships if, 80 years ago in 1944, my noble friend had asked what was the impact on jobs, growth and prosperity of World War II? The answer then would have been that, while those issues were important, there was an overriding priority.

Of course, climate change is not about saving freedom and democracy, but the Prime Minister and others, including in this debate, have described it as an existential threat. It follows that taking steps to avoid that threat would push the criteria my noble friend has chosen down the agenda. To that extent, they are of course important but secondary. The primary question should be: how effective is the Government’s agenda in averting climate change?

My noble friend may not accept that there is an existential threat, and others will argue this case better than I can, but my view is that we are approaching a number of tipping points that would adversely affect the world in which we live, with consequences for the air we breathe, global warming, rising sea levels, droughts, mass migration and the rest. So, forced to choose between my noble friends Lord Lilley and Lady May, my noble friend Lady May once again has my vote.

12:40

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Lilley for securing this important debate and for his insightful introduction. Climate change is real and a living reality for many across the globe. Indeed, for some small island nations, it remains an existential threat and it impacts growth and prosperity. In welcoming my noble friend Lady May to her place, I note that she brings incredible insights and a deep sense of devotion to public service, as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Young. During her tenure as Prime Minister, she championed tackling climate change and was a powerful advocate of collective action on the world stage. To coin a phrase, we are all in it together.

My noble friend Lord Lilley talked of my noble friend’s decision to appoint him to this House. I assure my noble friend that, perhaps like others, we love hearing his voice. I agree with his call for transparency of costs for enabling those long-term decisions, both at home and internationally.

As far as appointments are concerned, I will take a moment to give my personal reflections in relation to my noble friend Lady May. The noble Lord, Lord Young, talked of her selection for Maidenhead. She left a vacancy in Merton and I followed in her shoes, minus the heels of course—although perhaps, standing at five feet six, I would have benefited greatly from them. Nevertheless, she was an advocate for localism, and it was an honour to follow her. Indeed, she introduced me to the Conservative Party and appointed me as Minister of State at the Foreign Office. That turned out to be a long-term decision.

When I was appointed to the Foreign Office, one of my early visits was to the Caribbean. I was at the Pacific Islands Forum in Australasia, in Fiji. Hurricanes hit the Caribbean, and there was a moment of trepidation. Very early on in my career at the Foreign Office, I needed to invoke that call to the boss, to alert the Prime Minister to what had happened in the Caribbean. My noble friend acted promptly and convened a COBRA meeting, and with others I was dispatched to the region. What I saw was nothing short of devastation—it was like a war scene. It instilled in me the need to tackle climate change collectively and the need for international action.

What I saw first hand was physical devastation and the economic impact on both independent nations as well as our overseas territories. In Antigua and Barbuda, the country’s entire GDP was wiped out by Mother Nature and the ravages of the hurricanes. It brought into focus the importance of climate finance, which I will focus on, and the need to update processes and dated bureaucratic procedures that hindered countries’ abilities, particularly those that had graduated to middle-income status. Through a single event, through no fault of their own, they saw their economic infrastructure wiped out. As I look towards the Minister, I hope the Government continue to advocate for reforms in these international structures. They need reform urgently. I hope the Government will champion the importance of small island developing states accessing funds. More pointedly, the issue of access must be addressed. Much work needs to be done on technical support for these countries.

As a country, we have already signed up to internationally agreed targets limiting our emissions, and we have delivered on these. But the UK has also stood up and committed to providing financial support to developing countries, in the form of international climate finance. In 2009, the UK, together with other developed countries, committed to providing $100 billion in climate finance annually by 2020, provided by both the public and private sectors. During the UN high-level week in 2019, I announced a commitment of £11.6 billion for the years 2021 to 2026 on behalf of the United Kingdom, in support of this international target. Yes, the UK was rightly recognised as an international leader on this important priority. Can the Minister please confirm that the Labour Government will continue to uphold our international commitments?

The previous Government committed to investing directly in both adaptation and mitigation. They committed to spend $3 billion on nature, which was a priority of the COP we hosted in Glasgow. The direct benefits are clear: when you travel around the globe, you see how climate change impacts and you see the results of taking action. When I visited Bangladesh, I saw that nature-based solutions, through the replanting of mangroves, have a major and powerful result, not just mitigating typhoons but saving lives. As my noble friend highlighted, such action saves livelihoods.

At COP 26, we introduced the Global Forest Finance Pledge, and I hope the Government will continue to champion this, particularly as CHOGM is convened this week with our Commonwealth family of nations. Therefore, I ask the Minister again: can he confirm that the Government remain committed to upholding existing commitments? I was somewhat puzzled—perhaps the Minister can clarify—by how the commitment that the previous Government made on climate finance can be squared with the Foreign Secretary’s recent statement that the ICF would be subject to a planned spending review.

The issue of the UK’s green finance strategy, where the private sector is being mobilised, is also an important priority. I hope the Government will continue to focus on the strong relationship and co-operation between Governments and the private sector, which we heard about from the noble Lord, Lord Browne. I look forward to the Minister’s reply.

12:47

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, I remind the House of my declared interests, particularly as the former chairman of the Climate Change Committee. I particularly welcome the maiden speech of my noble friend. By talking about one nation and handing on to the next generation something better than we have ourselves received, she sums up why I am a conservative. Only when the Conservative Party follows those views are we actually conservative.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, for producing this debate. He is a very old friend, so he will not mind me reminding him a bit about his past. When Margaret Thatcher was off in the United Nations pleading for international action against climate change, he was telling his colleagues in the Cabinet that he did not really accept the arguments about climate change or global warming—

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

That is completely untrue. The noble Lord is making it up.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

I remember the conversation. The noble Lord said, “I’m a statistician, and the statistics don’t prove this”. But it is perfectly true that he now believes it is rock solid, although he does not accept that, if it is, we have to do everything about it because it threatens us all. His speech could be made in any parliament in the whole world, saying, “Climate change is very serious, but not for us, because we’ve got to do this, that and the other. It’s rather bad for our economy, so we won’t do it”. Every country could say that. His is the “After you, Claude” policy: when other people do it, then we do it. That seems to me to be dishonourable—you cannot put that forward. If you believe in climate change and see it as an existential threat, you have to act.

I am proud of a cross-party attitude; all parties have supported this, although my noble friend Lord Lilley did not support the Climate Change Act. We have to realise that there is a difference between accepting the facts and being prepared to act on them. Action means that we do it ourselves first because, if we do not, as the Bishops’ Benches would accept, there is no point in asking people to do as you say.

And the effect of Britain doing it has been remarkable. If I look back to my first days as chairman of the Climate Change Committee, I have to say that I did not expect that we would ever get to the decision in Paris. Nor would I have expected from Boris Johnson, whose leadership was not my favoured one, the remarkable steps forward which we had at Glasgow. The result was that nations throughout the world have signed up to net zero and have begun to ratchet up what they are doing. That is why we have to get back the leadership we lost by doing entirely unacceptable things such as putting off the date by which we were going to have compulsory electric or equivalent cars. That meant that business, as the noble Lord, Lord Browne, pointed out, did not in any way feel the conviction and the certainty that it needs.

Apart from being a Minister for 16 years, I have been a businessman all my life and I know perfectly well that the most important thing in business is to find out the certainties, and the certainties are clear: that climate change will get worse every year and the cost of not doing something about it gets worse every year. The Climate Change Committee has produced a detailed statement about how much it will cost: it will be something around 1% of our gross national product every year. But that is only if we do it—of course, it builds up. If you do not do it, it costs you more and more. The cost of inaction is huge and it is already true.

Because people—who shall be nameless—pressed Mr Cameron, now the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, as Prime Minister, he rowed back on what was called the “green rubbish”. What did he do? It meant that every family in Britain has had to spend at least £1,000 more because we have not moved fast enough into renewable energy. I do get fed up with people who cherry-pick the facts; the facts are quite simple. The basic cost of gas today is £83 per megawatt hour; onshore and solar have just been agreed at £68 per megawatt hour and offshore at £80 per megawatt hour, so already it is clearly lower, and that is with gas not at its highest price. Do we really want to be in the hands of the volatility of the gas price? Do we want to be in the hands of some of the nastiest regimes in the world, or do we want to have our own energy source at a lower price and at a cost we can afford? The figures are all there. The Climate Change Committee has done it year after year, but I have not noticed my noble friend Lord Lilley present at any of the presentations or discussions. So I merely say to him that he should read the documents again and accept that he is on one side and that science, the Church and the Climate Change Committee are on the other.

12:54

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Lilley for securing today’s debate and for his strong support for economic rationality in this area over the years since he voted against the Climate Change Act in 2008.

I draw noble Lords’ attention to my statement of interests in the register: I am a trustee of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. It is one of the few organisations that tries to keep the debate alive on this issue, so it is very good that we have today’s debate.

Today’s debate is a very good sign; I think the net zero consensus is beginning to crumble. In my view, we are not in a climate emergency. Climate change is a challenge we can meet; it is not one that requires us to upend our entire economy and way of life.

This debate is supposed to be about the economy and I want to focus on that. For too long, many people have claimed that net zero is good for growth and prosperity, and we have heard that today. I am sorry, but I believe this is nonsense and I am going to show why.

One reason why I am confident that our current approach is harmful is that it requires many normally sensible people, and perhaps some who are not quite so sensible, to believe in a whole series of economic fallacies for the policy to work. I shall briefly set out some of them. The first is the broken window fallacy. We are supposed to believe the Skidmore report that net zero will make us richer. Of course, spending trillions of pounds on a new energy system has some economic spin-offs and it does get you an asset, just like repairing a broken window funds the glazier and gets you a window back—but your wealth is just the same. In fact, what we are doing today is creating a reduction in wealth: the new asset is worse than the old one. The replacement of the current grid with rickety and expensive renewables is not an improvement; it is a massive reduction in productive capacity—malinvestment of the worst kind. Just think of all the genuinely productive projects that could be funded with the trillions that we are going to spend over the years and how much real wealth could have been created.

The second fallacy is that it is all going to be all right on the night. This is a belief that one day we will just solve the problems—that we will solve the storage problem with hydrogen, hydro, batteries or whatever. It is the view that interconnectors will always work well, that they will never export when they are supposed to import, and that those to whom we are connected will never think their interests come first. I learned from the vaccines saga and France’s threats to Jersey in 2021 that we cannot rely even on our closest friends when the chips are down. This policy is making us deeply insecure.

The third fallacy is that of self-deception, most obviously on prices and costs. In the real world, renewables are simply not getting cheaper and some are eye-wateringly expensive. The existing CfD-funded offshore wind farms have cost over £150 per megawatt hour in current prices this financial year so far. The new projects awarded in AR6 will cost more than £80 per megawatt hour, when, as my noble friend Lord Lilley pointed out, the market price is around £60. And those figures for renewables ignore the subsidy; they ignore the need for back-up and storage. A child can see, surely, that it is not cheaper to build a renewables grid, plus all the back-up, than just to build effective back-up and forget about the renewables.

The fourth fallacy is that jobs are a benefit, not a cost. Net zero proponents paint this glowing picture of hundreds of thousands of new, green jobs. But, if the energy system requires many more people than now, how is that making the country more productive? If you believe that, you must think that we could make ourselves wealthier by sending everyone back into the fields to work the land. We want the fewest and most highly productive jobs possible, like those we already have in the oil and gas industry—jobs which this Government are gradually extinguishing.

The fifth fallacy is that of the infinite availability of resources. In this world, in the net zero world, there is always lots of capital waiting to be used; we always have enough workers; there are no linkages or timing problems for proper sequencing; foreigners are always willing to lend to the UK; and UK consumers are always happy to save instead of consuming. Massive projects, such as insulating every home in the UK or doubling the capacity of the energy grid, can be undertaken apparently without any resource constraints or knock-on effects in the wider economy. To put it charitably, that is not a realistic depiction of the world in which we live.

Finally, there is the industrial policy fallacy. It is the view that the Government know best and that they can pick the technologies, the subsidies and the targets to get us to net zero: the ineffective boilers and heat pumps, the expensive EVs, the windmills—the technology that was last cutting edge in this country under Henry II. I think we can be confident that any project pursued in this way is going to be a drag on the economy; all economic theory tells us so.

I believe in the long-standing Conservative principles—seemingly so uncertainly held in much of my party nowadays—of economic freedom, decentralised decision-taking, incentives for entrepreneurs, and economic experimentation. Yet the net-zero approach that we have chosen is requiring us to junk all that in favour of greater control and restrictions, with Soviet-style production targets—policies that we believe are wrong in any area, except when it comes to net zero. I urge my colleagues on these Benches who support net zero to reflect that, if you are a Conservative and your policy forces you to implement socialism, just maybe it is a bad policy.

The truth is that all this can have only one consequence for the economy, which is to make it less productive and slower growing, as it increasingly is. The only way out is to unwind, invest in productive energy—gas and nuclear, and lots of it—stop picking winners and roll back the subsidies, letting the market decide. I would have more sympathy with net-zero proponents if, as some have been today, they were honest about this. If they said, “This is going to cost you, but we have to do it anyway”, at least it would focus minds and we could have a real debate about whether the ends justify the means and not the fantasy debate that we are currently in, where everything is for the best and everything will turn out right. On net zero, we need a bit more Hayek and a bit less Candide.

13:01

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, for securing this debate, even if perhaps it has turned out somewhat differently from what he expected. It has been a rich and encouraging debate, but I am not sure that the noble Lord, Lord Frost, has been watching the same debate as the rest of us. We have seen not a crumbling but rather a strengthening of the wall of understanding and common sense, particularly among the majority opposition party on this side of the House.

I join others in welcoming the noble Baroness, Lady May of Maidenhead, to your Lordships’ House, and to publicly offer thanks for her notably restrained resignation list, as the noble Lord, Lord Young, noted, offering the Green Party the seat that came to bring me into your Lordships’ House. I hope that she might encourage further moves in that direction from her new position in your Lordships’ House.

The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, in introducing this, said that he wanted an honest and informed debate. I start by picking up a couple of the terms that he used, including “cheap energy”. Fossil fuel energy, as a number of noble Lords have outlined and as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, identified, has very considerable externalised costs. In fact, burning fossil fuels is costing us the earth. As the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, highlighted, looking at the risk of the ending of AMOC—the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, often referred to as part of the Gulf Stream—giving Britain the climate of Scandinavia would be a considerable cost and could not be called a result of cheap energy.

I pick up the point from the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, on the drop in territorial emissions in the UK. As the Climate Change Committee has highlighted, we should be counting our consumption emissions. When we look at those figures, those emissions are only 19% lower in 2021 than in 2001. They are the goods and services that we are using, and we are responsible for the emissions associated with them.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, I think that the criteria that the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, has used to judge climate change action are interesting: jobs, growth and prosperity. I shall focus briefly on each of those. On growth, I am going to differ from most of the speakers thus far. We cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. We are, whether we like it or not, in a post-growth world, and it is not just me saying that—I point to the fact that the IMF has just been saying in the past week that we cannot have expectations of growth in future like the ones that we have had in the past. The pie of our economy cannot get bigger. What we have to do is to stop forcing some people to rely on crumbs and slice that pie up fairly. Who is benefiting from growth in an economy where, in the UK now, we have 4.3 million children growing up in poverty?

The second point is jobs. Everyone is saying that we need to create jobs. I remind the House that in one debate this week we were looking at the new funded childcare places. We need 36,000 more workers to provide those childcare places. We are short of 50,000 nurses and 100,000 care workers—and look at the immigration shortage list, which has chemical and biological scientists, bricklayers, stonemasons, tilers and retrofitters. These are the activities of the economy that we desperately need. What we need to do is to stop having jobs that trash our climate and environment and ensure that, in a just transition, those skills, and the energy, time and talents of those workers, go towards doing what we actually need to be done. That is a just transition.

Finally, I focus on prosperity. One dictionary definition gives it as

“the condition of being successful or thriving”.

We are a society in poor and declining health, and what the noble Lord identified as “cheap energy” is a significant contributor to that ill health. There is air pollution, for example. We can look at recent mapping from the EXPANSE project at the University of Utrecht. There are only a few areas in the north of Scotland that have pollution levels at or below World Health Organization-recommended levels. Those levels of air pollution are contributing to heart and lung disease, COPD, lung cancer, dementia, lower birthrate babies and asthma. We are not a prosperous society, we are an ill society, and the burning of fossil fuels is a significant contributor to that. Climate action is also action to improve health in our society.

The noble Lord, Lord Frost, questioned the insulating of homes. Having a warm, comfortable and affordable-to-heat home—a healthy home—is surely a foundation of life that our economy should provide to every single person. Let us not forget that the cleanest, greenest and cheapest energy that you can possibly have is the energy that you do not need to use.

I briefly mention childhood obesity, poor diet and our broken food system, based on fossil fuels. Our five year-olds now are shorter than they were a few years ago. The economy is not working for our people and it is not working in its own terms, so we cannot afford not to have a climate agenda—one that needs to be far bolder and more effective than what we have now. We should be looking for zero carbon by the early 2030s, because of the climate emergency, the nature crisis and the planetary boundaries that we are exceeding—but also for health and well-being and the prosperity of our nation. We need to ensure that we have well-paid and secure jobs in every role that actually needs doing. We need a climate agenda and a just transition for a society living within the physical limits of this planet.

There has been, and will be, a lot of talk about technological innovation. Of course we need that, but we also need social innovation—such as a four-day working week as standard, with no loss of pay; universal basic income; and free education. These are the social innovations that we need for climate action and for a prosperous society.

13:08

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome this debate, and I congratulate my noble friend Lord Lilley on initiating it. I too welcome my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead to these Benches and warmly congratulate her on her formidable maiden speech. We entered Parliament together in the other place in 1997, and I served under her leadership in the shadow team for environment, food and rural affairs, so I can vouch that she is well versed in the issues before us today.

Personally, I accept that climate change is real and that we are subject to increasing extreme weather events. I would argue, as my noble friend Lord Ahmad did, that we need a global approach to tackling it, and we need to find international solutions of not just one country acting on its own but to act together with the EU, the US and the BRICS countries, which we saw meeting this week—otherwise, progress will be slow, and it could serve potentially only to penalise our own industry and households. I welcome the reality check by the then Prime Minister, my right honourable friend Rishi Sunak, who in September 2023 undertook a more pragmatic approach.

I would like to speak in particular to the impact of the climate agenda on rural affairs, and I have to say that it is not altogether a positive one. Let me take some examples from the recent Climate Change Committee progress report to Parliament. First, the ending of production of any cars other than electric vehicles by 2030 will be extremely challenging for rural areas. There is a lack of charging points in rural areas, and there is also a lack of range. Apparently, we have gone from charge anxiety to range anxiety. If a car can go only 200 miles maximum, without any heating, radio, windscreen wipers or air conditioning in the summer, we rural dwellers—in either summer or winter—will be lucky if we can go 100 or 150 miles without having to charge again.

Secondly, on the commitment to renewable energy, such energy is often generated on land in the north of England or Scotland, or offshore and brought in to coastal areas. Yet the energy created is transported across rural and coastal areas—away from the very communities that could do with that electricity more than some others—through ugly, intrusive pylons and fed into the national grid. There is a very strong argument for ensuring that, whether it is offshore or onshore wind, the energy generated serves communities close to where it is generated, which is what generally happens in Denmark and other Scandinavian countries. As a result, those rural communities would be more inclined to support this type of rural energy going forward. I fear that if the Government persist with plans to criss-cross the country with even more overhead line transmission pylons, there will be a revolt. The earlier REVOLT—Rural England Versus Overhead Line Transmission—campaign, started by Professor O’Carroll in North Yorkshire, may be dormant but it will be revived if this persists.

Thirdly, the recommendations to ramp up tree planting and peatland restoration both sound like good ideas, but we should be aware that it takes 200 years to create a peat bog. Realistically, while we can bring about modest achievements such as the peat dams we created through the Slow the Flow project to prevent flooding in Pickering and North Yorkshire, it takes 200 years to create a peat bog from scratch. Tree planting in inappropriate areas can in fact be extremely damaging: it can create more floods, rather than prevent them. Also, I firmly believe that trees should not be planted on most fertile, productive farmland.

As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans set out, farmers have a key role to play in tackling climate change and achieving net zero. They have been the victims, particularly over the past 18 months, of the record rainfall taking large rafts of land out of production. My noble friend Lady May referred to 2023 being the hottest year on record; the last 18 months is the wettest period on record, particularly in England. Farmers would like to become more self-sufficient in energy production but, as I understand it, they are currently prevented from doing so by existing planning rules. The rules should be revisited to ensure that farmers can generate more of the energy they need, as other businesses are doing.

The rural economy provides the food we eat, and farmers are the powerhouse of rural communities. If we have learned anything from the current invasion and hostilities in Ukraine, it is that we need to boost our self-sufficiency in food, not least in fruit and vegetables, which is woeful: we are only 16% self-sufficient in fruit and vegetables. We also need to boost our food security. Food security and energy security are complementary and should go hand in hand.

The climate agenda should work just as well for rural areas as for urban ones. It should not undermine food production, jobs, growth and prosperity in rural communities, as it currently appears to do.

13:14

[Lord Moynihan of Chelsea (Con)]

My Lords, I refer to my interests as listed in the register. My remarks today will not be about the expected extent of climate change; however fervently some may wish to introduce that, it is not the topic of this debate.

Let me quickly address the claims made earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton. I read the Climate Scorpion report that he based his remarks on. He may wish to read it more carefully. The “tail” that the report refers to is not, as I took him to say, what is expected to happen in the end; rather, it is the highly unlikely worst case. It is our old friend the precautionary principle rearing its ugly head again; it is time we stopped basing policy on the precautionary principle.

I welcome my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead and congratulate her on making her maiden speech in this debate. Net zero was introduced in the waning days of her premiership, and since that Bill was passed—four years and four more Prime Ministers later—there has been no impact assessment of it. How can that be? One might wonder to what degree the impact is seen as unimportant, because net zero is a religion rather than a logical decision. Let us hope that that is not it. Microsoft and Amazon, of course, did their impact assessments, decided that renewables were for the birds and are purchasing nuclear power stations instead. We need a critically evaluated choice in which net zero’s impacts, particularly its cost, receive far closer consideration.

As my noble friend Lord Mackinlay, who is not in his place, has pointed out, in 2019 the Climate Change Committee estimated net zero’s cost at £50 billion a year—more than was claimed earlier in this debate—and quickly raised it to £70 billion. The OBR opined that the overall cost would be £1.4 trillion, which is £56 billion a year from now until 2050. That was five years ago, and we know how under-costed government projects always are. Depending upon your assumptions, different estimates increase from that £1.4 trillion up to £8 trillion or £9 trillion. At those sorts of sums, exactitude is by the by: such amounts will beggar the country regardless.

The Chancellor recently expressed alarm over a £20 billion pound black hole, but here we are talking of speculative expenditure going into the thousands of billions of pounds. You would expect us to have a pretty high level of certainty, therefore, that net zero was going to work. Do we? Not so much. Let us consider just a few of the many different ways in which our net-zero plan could fail. If the speculative net-zero carbon models prove overly pessimistic, the entire cost will have been wasted. If the rest of the world fails to follow us—that, let us face it, is pretty much what is happening—we will beggar ourselves while making the merest pinprick in atmospheric carbon levels. If we overload our grid because we do not overcome the formidable technical challenges of bringing solar and wind power from source to point of need, we will have brownouts, blackouts and a dangerously shrinking economy. If the controversially optimistic forecasts of the decline in the cost of mandated green products and wind power, and even in the number of windless days by 2050, fail to eventuate, the cost of net zero will dramatically and unaffordably escalate.

If, God forbid, we end up in, or near to, a war, and belatedly realise that our lack of heavy industry, of steel, of hydrocarbon feedstocks, imperils this nation, then net zero will be abandoned—although most likely too late for us to win that war. If there is a Europe-wide energy crisis, it will uncover our folly in relying on the trio of, first, renewables, secondly, one large, not-yet-working nuclear station and, thirdly, imported energy that, due to the crisis, suddenly becomes unavailable. Then, calls for a proper energy security policy will quickly lead to us dumping net zero. Any one of these could be enough to do for net zero, yet several are already what the situation is, with others lurking in the background. Probability theory tells us, therefore, that 2050 net zero will, in the end, never come to pass. Like some religiously motivated children’s crusade, it will never arrive at its intended destination, but there will be plenty of misery along the road.

Until such time as it is actually abandoned, net zero’s exorbitant cost and its overweening regulation will frustrate much human happiness, crowd out many useful innovations and, whatever ridiculous claims are made, lead to lower economic growth. Economic growth in our country is entirely possible, whatever is said. It comes from three things: leaner government, lower taxes and less regulation. Net zero is the opposite of each of those three. From the Financial Times to academia, the view is the same about green jobs, but talk of green jobs is nonsense. With net zero, the economy will grow more slowly, jobs will be fewer, innovation will be in so many ways frustrated and our nation will become less wealthy.

To conclude, sooner or later the net-zero programme will come to be seen as having been a tragic cul-de-sac. The longer we take to conclude that, the worse it will be for our economy. We owe it to our country to end this misguided, ultimately catastrophic programme as soon as possible.

13:21

[Lord Randall of Uxbridge (Con)]

My Lords, I start by congratulating my noble friend Lord Lilley on securing this debate. As he said, it is very useful and important that we have the debate and, because I do not want to be confrontational, I can tell him that the other day I actually agreed with him about Drax power station. We should work together to make sure that that “sustainable renewable” is exposed properly. I declare my interest as a director of Peers for the Planet and, tendentiously in this debate, as the chairman of the Human Trafficking Foundation, as my noble friend Lady May indicated.

I congratulate my noble friend Lady May on an excellent and inspirational speech. I have to warn her: she says she was told that this Chamber is different because people here speak only when they know what they are talking about. I am normally the exception to that rule, I have to say. I also have to say that this debate, in its good-natured Chamber way—as we do here, as opposed to at the other end—has been more confrontational than I have come across, I think, since I have been here. However, my noble friend was an excellent colleague. I came to the House of Commons a few months after her and left a few years before she did, but she was also my boss at No. 10 when I was the environment special adviser. As a couple of my noble friends here will not be pleased to hear, I helped to get the net-zero Act through. There were various other things that I think were a great success, including the Environment Act and what we did on plastic reduction. One of the reasons I mention waste plastic is that the important thing was to take the public with us and, by and large, we did, although Covid interrupted that a bit, with masks being thrown down and everything else.

The important thing about this debate is that I do not think I have heard anybody actually deny that there is a problem with the climate changing and the impact that that is having on the world and all the different aspects we have heard about. I think the problem is actually down to how much we want to contribute, or what not taking action will do for ourselves. A lot of these things are actually inconvenient for us, as my noble friend Lord Lilley said. Yes, it is inconvenient. I feel a little ashamed when my noble friend Lord Willetts mentions air travel, because I enjoy travelling around and I feel a bit of guilt about it.

I have seen some things happen as I have been around the world. As many noble Lords will know, I have a great interest in conservation and biodiversity around the world and I have seen the impact of climate change on biodiversity and on our natural world in stark relief. A few years ago, I was in Senegal. Our birds who come here to summer winter and feed in Senegal and the Sahel, and it is almost a desert now, so it is no wonder that they are disappearing and their numbers are going down. These are all things we have to consider.

I am talking about the impact around the world. My noble friend Lord Ahmad made reference to the small islands that are going to disappear and the things that can be done. Do we sit back in this country and say, “It is not going to affect us that much”? It is affecting us—we have seen that in the weather, the rainfall and what it is doing for farmers and everything else—but do we sit back and say, “Well, it is a bit inconvenient, but is it going to make a difference if we do something in this country?” It might not make a huge difference, except, as has been said, in giving an example to others. As we want to be good neighbours in our own homes and set a good example to others, whether it is just down our road, in our town or whatever, I think that is what we have to be doing in the world. We have to show that we can back up what we believe in.

I think we have to go out, and I encourage my noble friends who do not see eye to eye on this to have the debate, because we want to get people to understand what they are letting themselves in for. I can tell my noble friends that my children are intensely worried about what is happening, and I am worried about what world I am leaving my children. As my noble friend Lord Deben said, that is what I think. If I am going to stay on these Benches, which I aim to, it is that sort of Conservatism that I want to be part of.

13:27

[Baroness Hayman (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Randall, and to echo what he said. I think it is the first time that young people have been mentioned in the Chamber. We all need to recognise where the public are on these issues, particularly people younger than ourselves—where not my children but my grandchildren are about their future—because much of what we are debating today involves the potential damage and potential prosperity not of our generation but of generations to come. I declare my interest as chair of Peers for the Planet.

I am going to be disciplined and not follow many of the assertions that have been made in this debate with which I disagree; I will try to argue my own case, but I think it is a bit rich to be told that we, who are on the side of the argument that recognises the existential challenge of climate change, as the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, said, and the category in which that danger and threat exist, are the ones who are subject to the fallacy that it will be all right on the night. We are the ones who actually recognise that something has to be done.

If you accept the facts of the severity of climate change, they logically take you on to look at what needs to be done and, of course, what it costs. The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, is absolutely right—we are talking about big numbers. But the numbers are not nearly as big as they would be if we did not do anything. That point was made 15 years ago by the noble Lord, Lord Stern, in his review, it was endorsed by the OBR and there is a publication today from the University of Cambridge talking about exactly those issues. There is a cost to inaction exactly as there is a cost to action.

Much of the debate has focused, from those on the other side—we are a divided House, in some ways, on this—on the idea that those of us who argue for action overestimate issues; we overestimate the dangers of climate change. If you overestimate the dangers of climate change, you do not have to do so much. I would simply refer them to every single scientific climate academy and meteorological organisation in the world to see the seriousness of what we face. I refer in particular to the proximity outlined recently by Professor Tim Lenton of the earth systems tipping points, such as the melting of the west Antarctic ice sheet or the melting of the carbon-rich permafrost. These could cause irreversible change and accelerate some of the most damaging impacts far beyond those we have already seen.

We should recognise that, alongside those apocalyptic tipping points, there are also positive social and economic ones, and we should not underestimate them. To quote Professor Lenton again,

“tipping points in favour of renewable energy and EVs”—

in some countries but not here, because we have not done it properly—

“are already underway that can help eliminate 37% of global emissions”.

His wider work on tipping points suggest that the global economy could move rapidly towards zero emissions by triggering a cascade of tipping points for zero-carbon solutions in sectors covering 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

The cost of delay is serious. It is a cost because, rightly, we have to look at this country’s economic interests. It also means the cost of falling behind our rivals and those countries that have recognised what the future is: the States and those countries that have set strategic industrial targets and are seeing the benefits of that investment. For example, last year, clean energy represented 40% of China’s growth. We talk about China as the bad guy on emissions, but it is at the forefront of clean production and we should not go behind that.

The last thing we should not underestimate is the power of Government to unleash new economic opportunities by providing incentives and consistent policy frameworks that allow businesses to innovate and succeed, as my noble friend Lord Browne of Madingley said.

Nor should we underestimate how globally influential we can be in this area. As has been pointed out, we may only contribute to 1% of annual global emissions, but a third of global emissions worldwide come from countries with less than 1% of the total. Half of global emissions come from countries with less than 3% of the total. So our contribution does matter numerically, as does our leadership—our hard-won global standing—across business, science and technology.

I conclude by saying that I have always believed that this country’s contribution to fighting climate change will be measured not only in the quantity of the emissions we reduce but mainly in the quality of the leadership that we provide. I hope this Government will continue that leadership.

13:35

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend Lord Lilley for giving us the opportunity of this debate and it was a great privilege to listen to the maiden speech of my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead. I note that she had the prescience, having started her life at sea level in Eastbourne, where I live, to move up to the hills of Maidenhead, thereby ensuring that, whatever happens with global warming, she will be okay.

One advantage of this place is that we listen to people we disagree with and very often we learn from them. I listened to the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan of Chelsea, and I disagreed with much of what he said, although I did agree with him on the precautionary principle. The precautionary principle and, indeed, actuaries have made a huge mess of our pensions system, resulting in a stock market with annual outflows rather than inflows, greatly weakening our economy. I very much hope this Government will do something about that. When I was the Lords spokesman for the Ministry of Agriculture and BSE hit, the first reaction of the precautionary principle people was, “We must kill every cow in the country”. Fortunately, we took wider considerations into account—so one does learn from people one finds oneself in opposition to.

We are dealing with a science-based question. Science at its best is a retailer of truthful, beautiful, digestible stories, based on clear metrics, evidence for what works, a real interest in getting at the gaps in the evidence and constant evaluation. I think we are in much that position when it comes to climate change. There is a huge amount of work going in to trying to understand how our climate works. It is a very public body of work. I personally would like to see more red-teaming. I bristle when I hear about scientific consensus. Science is not about consensus; it is about disagreement and challenge. By and large, we have done a pretty good job on that. Where I think we have failed is on net zero. We have not produced the stories, the understanding—what my noble friend Lord Randall called “taking the public with us”. When even the national grid does not know what is expected of it in five years’ time, we are not being open about what lies in front of us—we are not taking people with us.

If we are going to make the best possible and best co-ordinated decisions, we need to really understand where we think we are going to get our power from and what its characteristics, price and availability will be. We are not dealing with little bits here; we are dealing with a whole system and economy and we need to understand how all the bits will work together. And this is not a story which will remain static. We are a long way away from 2050. How we think we are going to get there will change every year, but we need to be telling that story openly and I really hope that that is something the Government will set their mind to.

To pick on three smaller, more particular issues, one of the characteristics of net zero is that carbon will become really valuable. We will not have access to the fossil sources that we have relied on. If we are to run a chemical industry, produce jet fuel, or whatever it is we do, we need to find carbon where it is concentrated. We really ought to make an audit of where those carbon sources are, because a lot of what we now regard as waste will actually be a really valuable resource in 25 years’ time. We ought to build the systems to make access to that resource possible.

Secondly, nuclear clearly has some very good characteristics when it comes to powering those parts of the economy that need guaranteed, continuous power—a data centre is the obvious example, which is why Google has gone in that direction. I really hope that the Government, as they are with housing, will take a pair of shears to the regulations, which grew up over decades of excessive anxiety about the safety of nuclear, and look at giving us sites, chasing multiple technologies for modular nuclear reactors, and dealing with idiocies such as the prohibition on burning the nuclear waste at Sellafield. Why do we have to keep it when some varieties of modern nuclear reactor will use it as fuel?

Thirdly, let us look generally at where the technological pinch points are. What are we finding difficult that ought to be possible because it is allowed by the basic laws of science, but we cannot quite get there? Battery technology is an obvious example, but there are many others. We should make sure we put money into research, because if we can get an early lead there, it will turn into big industries.

13:41

[The Earl of Leicester (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Lilley for bringing forward this debate. It is astounding that it has never been had in Parliament until now. I refer the House to my interests in land in Norfolk as set out in the register—land upon which nearly every form of renewable energy other than wind has been developed.

I started installing all these green forms of energy in the late 20th century, nearly three decades ago. I have loved the journey and as a result have a reasonable idea, from a practitioner’s point of view, of what works. The first source of renewable energy we took was evacuated solar tubes for pre-warming water in shower blocks on our holiday park. Interestingly, it was the only one that was not subsidised. We decided to install them on economic grounds. On the Holkham estate, we are on target—at least aiming for, but pretty confident—to be net zero by 2035 and carbon negative by 2040, thanks in large part to a large number of trees, hedgerows, regen ag, and all the things we are trying to do for the right reasons to achieve that.

I remember when the coalition Government came in after the last Labour Government had apologised that they had spent all the money. David Cameron’s coalition demanded every department look for savings. One such thing that happened was that the feed-in tariff for solar power halved. The next day, somewhat miraculously, the cost of solar panels halved too. While I agree that it is necessary to kick-start all novel green energies, my example demonstrates that government is not necessarily the nimblest of bodies to administrate them.

Our new Labour Government have made clear to us their commitment to make the United Kingdom’s electricity supply carbon free by 2030. Despite my overall support for the transition towards a decarbonised future, I am becoming increasingly concerned about the speed of implementation of these policies. To put it bluntly, in less than three months it will be 2025. From that point onwards, the Government will have five years to radically transform the entire energy supply sector of our economy to be completely carbon free by 2030. Once again, I reiterate that I am a supporter of the transition to a greener future. However, I am also a realist. To believe that this transformation can occur in a mere five years, without having a crippling impact on various facets of our economy, is bordering on delusion.

It is a fact that when renewables are used to replace fossil fuels, the price of electricity goes up. Examples of this can be seen across other developed economies. For instance, the German Energiewende policy, designed to phase out fossil fuels and nuclear energy supplies, drove up electricity prices in Germany by 50% between 2006 and 2017. However, Germany’s phenomenal economic revival following the Second World War was based, in the main, on an unlimited supply of cheap energy, particularly on cheap gas from Russia. Recently, Germany has invested more than any other country in wind and solar power, but the current UK Government are convinced that we can do the same in a mere five years without similar kinds of economic effects.

In California, the home of US renewable power supplies, progressive policies such as these have increased prices at a rate which is five times faster than the rest of the United States. I wonder whether the Government have considered such case studies when formulating their decarbonisation targets. Can our economy, which is already under significant strain, afford for such additional pressures within the next five years?

I welcome the Government’s plan to increase wind and solar energy across the UK, but I am very wary of the threats an overreliance on these renewable energies could pose. As many Members of this House understand, wind and solar power are intermittent. This means that the energy they can harness is dependent on the strength of the wind or the level of sunlight on any given day. For now, this is not an issue, as the United Kingdom, along with many other nations, rests on the safety of a baseload of fossil fuel-powered electricity and nuclear. If the Government implement their decarbonisation targets, this baseload of gas energy may cease to exist.

One could rebuff my concerns around wind and solar power’s intermittent nature by claiming that there are ways to store excess electricity created when demand is less on very sunny or windy days. One of these methods is through pumped-storage hydroelectricity, a mechanism that is already in use across four sites in the UK. Despite the efficiency of this energy storage system, it can be installed only in mountainous areas with reservoirs high up them. Thus, it cannot serve as a grand-scale solution to this issue.

Another potential solution is of course batteries. In theory, this would provide a low-carbon solution to fill in for the intermittency issues of those renewable energy sources. However, once again, we have bad news. Researchers from MIT have shown that, for batteries to replace fossil fuels as baseload energy, battery storage costs would need to fall by 90%. I do not see how these changes can be feasible in such a short space of time.

Perhaps the lack of alternatives to fossil fuels as a baseload is why National Grid executives have been warning of potential blackouts in the south-east of England by 2028. Shifting away from this baseload of fossil fuels and gas, while ensuring that there is enough energy to keep the country running, will certainly require massive spending. If the Government’s decarbonisation targets are met by 2030, I am sure that it will come at an unbelievable financial cost. Does our economy have the capacity for such spending? I am no economist, but I do not think it does—at least not without pushing members of the public into deeper economic plight.

Finally, the Government’s policy of decarbonisation through deindustrialisation will have a direct, detrimental impact on our economy. The closure of Ratcliffe-on-Soar just a month ago represented the closure of Britain’s final coal-fired power station. Similarly, plans were announced to shut down the Port Talbot coke-fuelled furnace, making 2,500 out of 4,000 workers unemployed at that steel-making plant. Actions such as these will no doubt be commonplace in the coming years if the Government continue to impose their policy to achieve net zero by 2030. Let us be clear: these actions will not move the dial on global carbon reduction.

13:48

[Lord Strathcarron (Con)]

My Lords, I too am grateful to my noble friend Lord Lilley for securing this debate. The main impact of the Government’s climate agenda is to import pollution and to export jobs, growth and prosperity, and the two are directly linked.

Turning first to importing pollution, since 1990 our share of CO₂ emissions embedded in imports has risen from just over 10% to nearly 50%. The very fact that we import half our emissions should give us pause for thought, but, unfortunately, we are moving in the opposite direction. The decision to cease all new oil and gas licences can only mean that, in future, we will need to import even more oil and gas to make up for our own self-induced shortfalls.

Whether we like it or not, fossil fuels are here to stay for the foreseeable future. Even the Government’s own assessment suggests that, by 2040, the demand for natural gas will decrease by only 4%. This simply means that any domestic reduction in emissions will be made possible only by offshoring the production, and of course the jobs, to other countries. Furthermore, the imported fuels will need to be liquefied—itself a polluting process, alongside the emissions caused by shipping them here—and then there is further pollution from processing them after they have landed here.

While Ministers may be able to stand up at international conferences and proudly proclaim that our domestic emissions have reduced, these same policies have in fact only contributed to increasing global emissions. One might say that, as we produce only 1% of the world’s emissions, it does not really matter and that the gesture is more important than the reality. However, it is a mighty counterproductive gesture with a direct, negative impact on our standard of living and quality of life.

Turning to jobs, growth and prosperity, as has been well publicised, the UK now has the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world, which is directly caused by artificially penalising industrial and domestic consumers with subsidies for renewable energy, carbon pricing and the extra infrastructure costs as a direct result of the policy. The OBR suggests that subsidies for renewables will add £12 billion to our bills for this year alone—and it will only get worse as we factor in future renewable subsidies and the £100 billion grid upgrade needed for decarbonisation.

To give an indication of the wishful thinking by net-zero advocates, in 2014 the current Secretary of State for Energy promised 1 million new green jobs. The outcome is somewhat less impressive. Since then, official government data shows an increase in employment in the low-carbon sector of just 40,000. Against this must be offset the manufacturing jobs we have already lost in other sectors. Moreover, there will surely be many more to come, not least in the steel and oil and gas sectors. We now have the worst of all worlds: high taxes to pay for job losses.

The other great beneficiary of all this wishful thinking is China. It is now the world leader in two seemingly contradictory energy policies: green energy, by securing the global supply and demand lines for lithium-ion batteries, solar panels and wind farm components; and brown energy, by building the equivalent of two coal-powered power stations a week. However, the Chinese famously take much a longer-term view of events than we do. They would agree that, due to recent advances in paleoclimate science, we know that over the last 400 million years the earth’s climate has been changing constantly and often dramatically. Relatively speaking, we are now in one of its cooler periods—the late Cenozoic ice age—meaning that we are at the tail-end of a 50-million-year cooling period.

On our own continent, even very recently we can see climate change in action. In Roman times, it was far warmer than it is now, followed by a brutal cold period in the Dark Ages. Then came the medieval warm period, when vines were growing even in Scotland. That was followed most recently by an especially cold period called the “little ice age”, the coldest period in the last 10,000 years. The statement we heard today that 2023 was the hottest year on record is quite simply not true—far from it.

This long-term view of the earth’s climate changes puts the whole net-zero delusion into a much greater perspective. It suggests that we are taxing and bankrupting ourselves domestically for absolutely minimal global benefit, if any. This whole worldview of climate change should be the subject of another debate, and a very fruitful one it would be too.

13:54

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I rise to speak in the gap and apologise to your Lordships for having failed to get my name down in time. I start by declaring my interests and say that I shall endeavour to be crisp.

I believe that there is a real challenge from climate change and that, where one is facing a challenge, you have to do something about it. For the last six years or so I chaired a local enterprise partnership at the other end of England, which was established to address problems, to do and to catalyse things being done. We were a small organisation; we had a small budget and pretty small capacity. At about the time I took over as chair, there was a resurgence in general political awareness and interest in all the issues related to climate change. Needless to say, I and the rest of my board were bombarded by advice, ranging from eminent scientists through to cranks, mountebanks and chancers—sometimes it was not clear which was which.

What should we do? We were an organisation to do things, not to talk about things: the opposite of your Lordships’ Chamber today, where we have had a lot of talk—not that that is a bad thing, because you have to think before you act. But what should we do? I advised the board and it agreed that, within the general parameters of the relevant regulations, we should focus on what we thought would be most effective and bring the biggest bang for the buck we could. We focused on business decarbonisation and clean energy generation. I said, “Don’t worry too much about what they think in Whitehall; we’ll just get on and do it”. I believe that was the right approach, because you have to have policies that work and are sensible not merely in theory but in practice. Just as an aside, I suggest that another look at the EPC regulations against such a background would be a good plan.

It is important that we all recognise that action is necessary, and it must be considered action. As I thought about it, it struck me that perhaps the most effective response of all to climate change was one of the earliest ones. When Noah was told that the world was going to be flooded, he did not sit and wait; he cut down gopher trees and built an ark, and thereby saved the world.

13:56

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as chief executive of United Against Malnutrition and Hunger.

I start by congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady May of Maidenhead, on her excellent and moving maiden speech. I was chief of staff to the Deputy Prime Minister when the noble Baroness was the Home Secretary. It is fair to say that the DPM office and the Home Office did not always agree on things, and in fact the noble Baroness was a cause of some suspicion of me among my fellow advisers. One time we were all having a drink when somebody posed the question, “Who’s your favourite Conservative Cabinet Minister?”, and to the consternation of many I said it was the noble Baroness. This was quite shocking to them; I think the noble Lord, Lord Clarke of Nottingham, was generally the more favoured Conservative Cabinet Minister. I said it because, despite the policy differences we often had with the Home Office, I was always a great admirer. It was not just because, like the noble Baroness, I am a child of a vicarage but because politics never appeared to her to be a game, as it did to some people. It always seemed that she was serious about government and its role in serving the public; she never shied away from difficult problems and was always willing to confront and adapt to inconvenient truths. I know I was not alone; my noble friend Lady Featherstone, who was a junior Minister in the Home Office, was also a huge admirer. It is great to have the noble Baroness in this House. On this occasion we will agree; we may disagree in future.

The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, whom I congratulate on getting this debate, opened by saying how important it was to have an open and honest debate around the figures, and I entirely agree. One needs to be honest about the costs of net zero. But as the noble Baronesses, Lady May and Lady Hayman, the noble Lord, Lord Deben, and many other noble Lords said, we have to be honest about the costs of inaction as well. The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, spoke about cheap energy, but he did not say anything about the actual costs of that carbon energy—the external costs, which the noble Lords, Lord Browne of Madingley and Lord Willetts, referred to. The noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, talked, from his actuarial background, about the scale of risk and how we are probably underestimating, rather than overestimating, it.

The noble Lord, Lord Strathcarron, complained recently about carbon pricing as if carbon emissions do not have a cost. They have a severe cost. The noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, and the noble Baroness, Lady May, referred to small island states. The cost to them is utterly existential.

The noble Baroness, Lady May, also talked about what happens when agriculture fails as a result of climate change. She spoke movingly about how wide ranging the impacts can be, including on modern slavery. In my work around malnutrition and hunger, we see how climate is driving hunger, malnutrition and conflict. The costs are huge, not only to the people who are directly impacted; the costs will also come home to us in terms of migration, et cetera.

Earlier this week, or perhaps at the end of last week, Concern Worldwide (UK) published a report on the climate impacts on nutrition. It is not just that crops are failing; climate heating is having an impact on their nutritional value as well.

The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, spoke about the series of misery that we were going to impose by acting on net zero. Let me tell him this. Some 38 years ago I worked in a rural school in Zimbabwe. I am still in touch with many of the pupils I taught then, who are now somewhat older. They report the impacts of climate change as increased extreme weather events and drying rivers; they are unable to fill their fish ponds anymore. This is causing misery for people now—misery that is replicated all across the world.

It is coming home to roost here as well, because rising temperatures and changes in precipitation patterns are altering vector breeding habits and pathogen development. The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Malaria and Neglected Tropical Diseases recently organised a visit to Ethiopia, which I was lucky to attend. We visited the Gelan health centre on the outskirts of Addis Ababa with the Global Fund. As many noble Lords will know, Addis Ababa is high up and is traditionally a non-malarial area. Well, at that health clinic on the outskirts of Addis, they were seeing the first evidence of transmission of malaria in that area as warming happens.

These mosquito-borne diseases are spreading with climate. Dengue has seen a thirtyfold increase in the past 50 years. There are more than 5 million cases globally and transmission has started across Europe, with local transmission now in Spain, France and Italy. I recently visited south-west France. When I returned, I went to give blood. They asked me, “Have you been abroad?”, and I said, “Only to France”. They asked where. I told them, “Somewhere near Cognac”, and they got out their maps. They said, “I’m sorry, you can’t give blood until after the quarantine period. That is now a tropical virus area”. It is expected that dengue will be transmitted locally in London by 2060. Think about the costs of those sorts of things to our economy.

The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, said that India, China and Africa do not give a damn what we do regarding climate. That is absolutely untrue. I was recently in South Africa, talking to the Portfolio Committee on Electricity and Energy. We had been saying that we were going to issue licences for more oil and gas and then announced that we were opening another coal mine. The committee said, “Why on earth should we do any of the things that you say we should on net zero when you’re doing this?” Example is contagious—nothing is more contagious. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, said in her excellent speech, the quality of the leadership we show is critical as well.

There are also huge economic opportunities from leadership. The noble Lord, Lord Browne, spoke about our sustainable green finance capability in the UK. We have a real opportunity to develop that. There are opportunities with energy efficiency in our homes—the savings that we could make for people on their household bills and the jobs that could be created. Look at what happened to household energy between 2010 and 2020. Household energy costs fell. Why? Because consumption fell. Why? Because the green levies were funding insulation and reductions in consumption. As the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said, if we had continued with that, we would have made massive savings.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, said that it was quite rich for those on this side of the argument to be accused of saying that it will be all right on the night. I fully agree with her. The noble Lords, Lord Lilley, Lord Frost and Lord Moynihan, and others, like to pose as the hard-headed realists in the face of starry-eyed idealists like me and others, I suppose. However, they are the fantasists. Because they do not like some of the things that we will need to do, some of which will be difficult, they pretend that this does not exist. The noble Lord, Lord Frost, says that he does not believe in the climate emergency. Well, I am afraid science does. We need to act—and act now—because, as the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said, the longer we wait, the more it will cost.

14:07

[Lord Offord of Garvel (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, for tabling this debate. I also welcome my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead to her place in this House and congratulate her on a first-class and compelling maiden speech.

Speaking on behalf of the Front Bench of His Majesty’s Opposition and having read the document, I begin by applauding the Government on their ambition in this area—the ambition to

“make Britain a clean energy superpower”.

This is something I think all sides of the House can agree on. I note that the energy mission is very specific and stated as being to cut bills, create jobs and deliver security with cheaper zero-carbon electricity by 2030, accelerating to net zero. This has been highlighted by my noble friend Lord Leicester. The practicality of this is an area that I should like to explore this afternoon.

To remind ourselves what we mean by net zero at 2050, we can say that today we power our economy by roughly 75% hydrocarbon and 25% renewable, and that our target by 2050 is to spin that on its head and make it 75% renewable and 25% hydrocarbon. We can all agree that it is a good target. What we are talking about today is how we get there and at what cost.

The first thing to say about net zero is that it does not mean zero hydrocarbon. Hydrocarbon is a very important part of our energy supply. We still have high-intensity industries in this country that we need to power. We have days when the sun does not shine or the wind does not blow. We have a baseload that we need to take care of. However, we have an opportunity to make our hydrocarbon the greenest in the world. The science and technology being deployed in the North Sea is extraordinary. There will be no flaring, there will be carbon capture and there will be the use of green hydrogen. The technology will allow us to have the greenest hydrocarbon fuels in the world, thereby not relying on bringing in dirty fuel from elsewhere.

We will surely end up with a balanced scorecard. Is that not the point of this? We will have 75% non-hydrocarbon, whether—pick a number—50% or 60% renewable and 15% or 25% nuclear. If we do this correctly, we will have a balanced scorecard, which will be to everybody’s benefit.

The philosophical question is: who are we to determine the mix? Should it be left to bottom-up forces to determine where the best solutions lie, as technologies emerge, or should it instead be imposed by top-down ideologies? My worry about the Government’s 2030 target is that it is artificially unrealistic and driven by ideology and politics rather than practical. If that is the case, what are the costs? Will this cost the British consumer on the journey that we feel sure we will achieve by 2050?

Why do I say that the Government’s ambitions are perhaps unrealistic? To take the calculation of leading analyst Cornwall Insight, if the renewables are principally solar, onshore and offshore wind, they will provide 44% of UK electricity by 2030. That is the date that the Government have in mind, but 67% is required to fully decarbonise the electricity system. These are two quite different numbers, and Cornwall Insight calculates that it would cost a whopping extra £48 billion, on top of the £18 billion already committed, to achieve that target by 2030. The British taxpayers will ultimately bear that cost, through a combination of higher consumer bills and higher taxes.

The first question I pose to the Minister is whether the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and the Treasury completed an impact assessment of this timetable and the 2030 target, including a sensitivity analysis that clearly takes account of energy pricing and capital cost volatility.

On energy transition, there was consensus in the House that we will go from 75% to 25% or the other way round. The worry is that we do not want to do this at the point of endangering jobs and prosperity. Take, for example, the impact on the North Sea oil and gas sector. This sector employs 220,000 people in the UK. These are highly technical and well-paid jobs, 93,000 of which are in Scotland. The windfall tax imposed by the previous Government, however reluctantly, at least had the merit of being temporary until 2025. It could be justified as preventing short-term profiteering after the Ukraine war. The current Government’s plan to increase that to 78% and extend it to 2029 will create a massive disincentive to investors in this sector, which remains important to our economy. This will be a barrier to growth. As one American investor said to me recently, “We now consider west Africa a more stable and appealing investment environment than the UK”.

Labour’s proposed ban on awarding any new North Sea oil and gas licences has already spooked producers. For example, the three owners of the Buchan field, 120 miles off the shore of Aberdeen, have already delayed by a year their planned start to oil production, until they have clarity on the Government’s intentions. Be aware that these gas licences are already in the pipeline. Approval was given many years ago and they are already baked into our net-zero plan for 2050. They are already baked into the green hydrocarbon fields, which will still allow us to have a quarter of our energy from that important source. Delays in this regard are not to the benefit of anyone, consumers or otherwise.

Just look at how the North Sea transition should work practically, rather than ideologically. The fact is that the biggest investors in renewables in the North Sea are the hydrocarbon companies, as they are reinvesting their profits in renewables. They hold the two key components for an orderly transition to net zero from oil, gas and renewables—capital and people.

I will give the House an example on capital. I had the privilege of sitting on the North Sea Transition Forum while I was a Scotland Office Minister. One of the investors in the North Sea said their target for capex in 2025 was going to be 50% in hydrocarbon, 50% in renewables to get a blended return on capital of 12.5%. Being a private equity guy, I asked, “What is your return on capital on renewables?”. After a short silence and a slight look at the floor, it emerged that return on capital is quite low, about 5%. If you do the maths at 50:50, you work out that the return on capital on hydrocarbon is 20% to get your blended 12.5%. That is market economics because wind and water are, on the face of it, relatively cheap to capture, and therefore they are not expensive things to generate and one has a lower return on capital, whereas hydrocarbon is more difficult, especially in the deeper fields in the North Sea, requires a lot more expense and therefore has a higher cost of capital. The point is that one is funding the other, and you cannot disconnect the two.

On the second thing around people, I had the privilege in that period of going to the offshore wind farm at Kincardine, off Aberdeenshire, which is the biggest in the UK. Fun fact: if you are doing media, take them on the boat to Kincardine wind farm. The journalist was so ill on the journey that he could not ask me any questions. What is notable about the sheer scale and size of these floating turbines is the technology and engineering required to power and maintain them. The skills that have been developed in the deep sea offshore oil industry are now being deployed to create our offshore wind farms overseas. That expertise is sought around the world. I did a couple of trade missions to Chile and Mozambique, two countries with large coastlines. UK expertise is required to help the world understand how to do offshore wind farms.

Hydrocarbon companies have the key components of capital and people. If we accelerate the transition just for ideological purposes—just to say at conferences that we have brought our target forward by five years—and along the way we reduce capital in the system and make skilled people redundant, I am afraid we will not get the transition we all want. There will be no transition at all; it certainly will not be a just transition. It will result in needless job losses and project cost inflation to the great detriment of British consumers and taxpayers. Offshore Energies UK thinks that trajectory of shutting down the North Sea too early will result in 42,000 job losses, 25% of this critical and well-paid sector. So my second question for the Minister is: have DESNZ and the Treasury done any impact assessment on the jobs and prosperity to come from this ideological early acceleration of the North Sea transition?

The issue—ideology versus being practical—is also driven by top-down targets imposed by Governments. Is that the right thing that we should be doing? If we look at a couple of examples, such as what is happening with electric vehicles at the moment, we have actually managed to reduce—oh, I am way over my time. I will leave that there.

In conclusion, my worry is that we need to be more practical in how we deliver the transition, and we also need to allow technologies to emerge. They will provide the answer to the question we are facing. We do not wish to become like a telecoms company in the 1990s installing infrastructure for phone boxes, landlines and fax machines. We need to be savvy and technologically aware.

14:19

[The Minister of State, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (Lord Hunt of Kings Heath) (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, for instituting a very interesting debate and to all noble Lords who have spoken in it. I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Offord, to what I think is his first speaking outing in his new position. I thank him for his service as a Minister and readily acknowledge that on the Horizon sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses issue he was very fair in the information and responses he gave to the House.

I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady May, on what I can describe only as a truly excellent maiden speech, which included her insights into the threats that climate change can bring and the risk to vulnerable people. I commend her record in relation to modern slavery, which has been very much recognised in our debates on these issues over the last few years. I echo the noble Lord, Lord Young, in saying that her sensitivity to the House of Lords when it came to the question of the balance of membership and appointments was highly regarded around the House.

We have had a really interesting debate. We have heard again from the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, who extended the argument that he started in our King’s Speech debate. Essentially, as he said then, he accepts that the science of global warming is rock solid but he is sceptical that tackling climate change and accelerating the move to net zero will lower energy bills and generate economic growth. I get his argument, but I think he would recognise that he had a mixed response even from his own Benches. I certainly warmed to the noble Lords, Lord Randall, Lord Willetts and Lord Ahmad. The noble Lord, Lord Deben, a former chair of the Climate Change Committee, put the case for urgent action.

It is noticeable that the noble Lords, Lord Moynihan, Lord Frost and Lord Strathcarron, and to a certain extent the noble Earl, Lord Leicester, came in firmly behind the noble Lord, Lord Lilley. The noble Lord, Lord Offord, while praising our ambitions, posed challenges over the 2030 target. I sense, as the noble Lord, Lord Frost, suggested, that some of the political consensus on net zero may be breaking down. That would be a great pity. It would be a pity if the Conservative Party under its new leadership retreated on net zero. To pick up the point about the need to take the public with us and to paint them a picture of where we are trying to get to on net zero, a lack of political consensus would make it much harder to get that over to the public, whose support we need for what are often going to be very challenging policies. There is no point running away from that. The noble Lord, Lord Browne, is right: the last Prime Minister relaxing the electric vehicles target had a really damaging impact on the sector and public confidence. My worry is that the Conservative Party as a whole seems to be retreating from its ambitions. With due acknowledgement to St Augustine, the Conservatives seem to be saying, “Oh Lord, deliver us from climate change, but not just yet”.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman—whose leadership of Peers for the Planet I readily acknowledge and applaud—put it, the 2030 target is not a notional political game. The fact is that we cannot afford to slow down; we have to speed up. Despite the comments by the noble Lord, Lord Frost, on climate change we know that human activity has already resulted in warming of around 1.3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. We are seeing the impact already. This is no longer a theoretical construct for the future; it is happening now, here and globally. As the noble Lord, Lord Oates, said, in some developing countries the impact is having a huge consequence on individual vulnerable people already.

The paper circulated before this debate by Peers for the Planet and Exeter University quotes a number of people including Professor Penny Endersby, chief exec of the Met Office, who should know a thing or two about this. She says that if we do not limit temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius, we will see

“many more weather and climate extremes”,

resulting in

“loss of food, water and energy security, leading to increased global conflict”.

The other point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Oates, is that the spread of disease cannot be confined to those vulnerable developing countries. In the end, we will suffer the impact as well.

The comment by the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, about the threat to small islands was very well taken. I also noted his comment about climate finance and the need to support developing countries. I can confirm to him that we are resolutely committed to upholding previously agreed international commitments, such as the global forest finance pledge. He will of course understand that we are approaching crucial discussions at Baku in the next COP meeting.

The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, was a mite critical of the Committee on Climate Change. I thought that his noble friend answered that pretty robustly as well, but the Government respect the work of the committee. We rely on its independence to provide us with robust advice, which I believe it has done. The robustness of its research and evidence has been first rate. The committee was critical of the previous Government because of the inconsistent messages they gave on net zero, with the cancellations, delays and exemptions to certain practices undermining confidence. The committee has said to us that we are currently off track to hit the 2030 target of a 68% reduction in emissions compared with 1990 levels and that we have to move “fast”. It said:

“Action is needed across all sectors of the economy, with low-carbon technologies … the norm”.


I suppose that is one of my responses to the noble Lord, Lord Offord. That is why we have to move so quickly.

So what we have done? The noble Lord, Lord Young, asked how effective the Government’s approach is and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, discussed the power of government. In a sense, the philosophical question that the noble Lord posed was about whether this should be bottom up or led by the Government. I think that, on climate change, the challenge is so tough that government really have to take a lead.

This is what we have done in the last few weeks. We have got rid of the ban on onshore wind; consented a number of large solar farms; launched GB Energy to leverage in private sector investment; and reached a partnership deal between GB Energy and the Crown Estate to encourage yet more offshore wind development. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, that we have also signalled our support for nuclear power as the essential baseload of our electricity generation. We had a very successful auction round, which delivered a record number of new clean energy projects. We have announced funding for carbon capture utilisation and storage projects, which are very important for the industrial processes of the future. We have set up an office for clean energy jobs, because of the whole discussion about the skills agenda, and published an industrial strategy to support key growth-driven sectors, including clean energy.

Unlike some members of the party opposite, we actually believe in an industrial strategy. It is not a question so much of government picking winners as of trying to support, as much as we can, from the centre, those sectors that clearly have great potential to grow and to export. The central argument is that investing in clean energy at speed and scale can help tackle the climate crisis. We can create good-quality jobs, drive investment, protect bill payers in the long term and, crucially, ensure energy security.

On the question of why the UK should be taking the lead, my answer is: why on earth not? The noble Lord, Lord Deben, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, were so right. We have a strong vested interest in the world achieving net zero as soon as possible and we can have a pivotal role in persuading other countries to follow our example.

The question of costs and economic growth was focused on by the noble Lords, Lord Moynihan, Lord Lilley, and the noble Earl, Lord Leicester. The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, referred to Dieter Helm’s review for the previous Government. I have now had a look at least at the summary of the report, in light of his King’s Speech remarks. What is noticeable is that the previous Government ducked it when they had the results of the review. They then conducted what they called a “listening exercise”, and we all know why Governments do listening exercises—because they have received a report they did not like. As far as I know, the previous Government are still listening, because it was never brought to a conclusion. I suspect that means that this is not a simple area of cost comparisons.

I know that the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, is critical of the use of levelised costs to get a fair comparison—he said that, too, in the King’s Speech debate—but it does attempt to compare the costs of different generating technologies over different timescales: essentially, over the lifetime of the generator.

The noble Earl, Lord Leicester, asked: can we afford the transition to net zero? An assessment by the Office for Budget Responsibility in 2021 concluded, as the noble Lord, Lord Deben, surmised, that the

“costs of failing to get climate change under control would be much larger than those of bringing emissions down to net zero”.

My noble friend Lord Davies was critical of an Answer I gave to a Written Question yesterday on AMOC. He is concerned that the risk assessment of the actuarial profession is not fully recognised. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, also referred to this. I say to him that that Answer came after very considered advice, but of course I will take away his comments. I take his point about actuaries: who could doubt the importance of actuaries in forecasting the future? But even they do not always get it right.

There is the question of course of whether in our drive to net zero we are impacting our own industries and importing more from abroad. Of course, I do take that and I accept that we will never be a leading manufacturer in all renewable technologies. However, we can assemble, and we are now assembling, many of those imports, so a lot of the value comes to British companies and workers. We also have many opportunities to export our skills as well. For instance, the noble Lord, Lord Browne, referred to our world-leading R&D capability, which is capable of export in many ways too.

There are areas of technology where we have a great opportunity to export. I cannot go into the details of, for instance, the assessment by Great British Nuclear of the small modular reactor technologies at the moment, but British companies are involved in development. It is just worth noting that Rolls-Royce has a contract with Czechia to produce a fleet of nuclear reactors in that country. There are many other opportunities as well.

The noble Lord, Lord Strathcarron, spoke about the issue of green jobs. We reckon that around 640,000 people are employed in green jobs in the UK. That is a rise of 20% even from 2020 to 2022, which I would have thought those in the party opposite would wish to acknowledge; it happened under their stewardship. The noble Lord, Lord Frost, suggested that we wanted the fewest, highly productive jobs, and I agree with him. But these jobs are often very high-quality jobs in a growing sector and are very well paid. We surely need to embrace that. One of the issues we face is that, in many of those sectors, there may now be a shortage of people coming forward. We need to work very hard to make sure we have enough people who can contribute in those sectors.

I have responsibility for the nuclear industry in my department. We have a target; we need 40,000 more people in that sector by 2030. The national nuclear skills council projects that, by the 2040s, we will need well over 100,000 people. That is a huge opportunity for really high-quality skilled jobs. They can be at apprentice level, graduate level or, indeed, PhD level. It is an industry which, like many other low-carbon industries, really has a future.

The noble Lords, Lord Offord and Lord Strathcarron, were critical of our approach to oil and gas, specifically oil and gas production in the North Sea. North Sea oil and gas production will be with us for many years to come and we will need oil and gas for many years, but as the noble Lord, Lord Offord, knows, the UK continental shelf is described as a super-mature basin. Since 2000, its production has gone down by about 7% to 8% per year on average. The key challenge for us is to maintain that field, because of its strategic importance, but to allow it to transition as we change the energy structure. I totally agree with the noble Lord about the people working there and their skills. He is right that many of them have transferred to the offshore wind sector. I believe they can transition to other skilled jobs as well.

I was asked a number of questions about the externality of carbon emissions. The UK prices emissions in the UK Emissions Trading Scheme, but I will write to noble Lords with some of the details of that.

Are we confident about private sector investment? Yes—all the indicators we have show that many private sector companies want to invest in this new agenda.

Many other points were raised. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, that I asked my officials for quick advice on using the ark, but answer came there none. I have already referred to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, on nuclear. On his point about data centres and advanced nuclear reactors, we have recently seen some exciting developments in the US. It would be good to see similar developments here, and we clearly need a much more flexible siting policy to allow that to happen. We are working on that. I have met a number of companies that are very interested in investing in AMRs, linked to either data centres or industrial centres. They have told me that they do not need any government money, but we will see.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans and the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, made some telling interventions on rural issues. I take their point about farmers, food security and the need to embrace them in this agenda. We worked with the NFU on that when I was a Defra Minister many years ago, and we clearly need to carry on doing so.

The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, in particular, as well as the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, raised electric vehicles. We had a debate on this last week, and the points raised there are being taken forward by the Department for Transport. If the noble Lord and the noble Baroness read Hansard, they will see that their points on issues in rural areas and on the differential in charging were very much picked up.

I of course understand the concerns expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, about the grid. No one really likes grid pylons but we have to do something about the grid network—we have to invest in it. I take her point about local incentives. I recently went to Biggleswade solar farm in Bedfordshire, where the company makes a contribution to local community projects each year—churches and things like that—which goes down well. We are looking at that issue.

This has been an excellent debate. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, for his willingness to raise sometimes challenging issues. We believe we are delivering on our manifesto commitment. We need decisive action on both climate change and energy security. We will have a big positive impact on jobs and prosperity. We must press on and we will.

14:39

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to everybody who has made fantastic contributions to this excellent debate. I pay particular tribute to the Government spokesman, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, whom we have just heard. His response to everybody and everything that was said was one of the most fair-minded and constructive that I have heard, not least in fairly representing what I was trying to say—though I am not accusing him of agreeing with me.

I want also to congratulate my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead on an outstanding maiden speech. It was noteless; it was witty; it was compassionate. We are aware, obviously, of her other great legacy on modern slavery. The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, reminded us of her concern for the just about managing in our own country, and she emphasised her concern for the poorest, who are the greatest victims of climate disasters—when you are hit by a flood, it does not matter to you whether they are more frequent than floods in the past; they are still a disaster. But the reason the poor are vulnerable is that they are poor, and the reason that they are poor is that they do not have the access to cheap energy that makes us rich. If we deprive them of access to cheap and affordable energy they will remain poorer for longer. Even if we in this country think that we can afford excessively high energy costs, we should not try to impose them on the poor and slow down their growth.

I next thank the noble Lord, Lord Deben, who offered my greatest support for what I had to say, since, because he could not refute a word that I had said, he chose to criticise things that I had not said. He criticised me for saying, allegedly, that we should not make any contribution on this front. What I actually said was:

“I accept that we must be prepared to make our proportionate contribution”.


He went on to say that I had said something in Cabinet under Mrs Thatcher, which is simply untrue. I remind him of the exchange we once had in John Major’s Cabinet, which was not about this but about statistics, when he was wrong.

The noble Lord did not respond to the points about why he needed to take costly legal action to prevent publication of the analysis that his committee had done on the cost of climate change avoidance in 2050. My general view is that when people do not want to publish facts it is because they think the facts are rather weak. I assume that is why he did not refer to them.

On the general issue of costs, with the exception of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, almost nobody who was enthusiastic for doing more and spending more and who generally goes around saying that we can do that in a costless fashion commented on the costs I gave. None of them referred to the fact that we have the highest costs of electricity for our industry of any country. One can only assume again that they are embarrassed by the facts. Likewise, when it came to new industries, apart from small nuclear, which I mentioned and have advocated for a long time, nobody gave detail of how these industries are going to generate new prosperity when we have doubled the amount of onshore wind, trebled the amount of offshore wind and quadrupled the amount of solar or whatever it is, when that has not happened so far.

There were a couple of important arguments that it is important for me to address because they go to the heart of the issue. One was on the issue of external costs, which was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and the noble Lords, Lord Willetts and Lord Browne. Theirs was the logical response to what I am putting forward, which is to say: “Yes, you’ve got to balance the costs of doing something against the damage that would be done if you don’t, and the logical way to do that is a carbon tax”. If we take the American Government’s estimates, for example, which say that the carbon tax should be $51 per tonne, which is about the equivalent to $10 per megawatt hour, it does not make any difference to the fact that renewables would still be uneconomic in this country.

Then came the most difficult issue, which people who take my position have to face up to, and that is the threat of existential crisis. If continuing to do nothing—I am not proposing that we do nothing—were likely to result in the extinction of the human race, or even its immiseration, almost no costs would be too great to avoid it. I accept that.

I put down a Question some while ago to the Government asking whether they knew of any peer-reviewed science, or science produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—whose job it is to consider the science—which forecasts that, if we do nothing over the coming centuries, it will lead to the extinction of the human race or even its immiseration. They said that no, there was no such peer-reviewed science, so those who invoke it are invoking something that is not peer-reviewed science, although that does not mean to say that it is wrong. Some things can turn out to be right that have not yet got through the peer review process. But let us not pretend that we are dealing with a threat that scientists have declared to be existential—they have not.

We are left with the central core of the debate: should we have an honest discussion about the costs and benefits of pursuing the path of net zero? I am glad to say that the Church was on my side on that front—that we want an honest debate. We can do that only if the Government and bodies such as the CCC, the National Grid and the Royal Society have the honesty and integrity to admit that about their information. The Royal Society—or the author I cited—has admitted that his figures were underestimates. We can have that debate only if we have that information from those sources in an unbiased way rather than in a campaigning way. I am grateful to everybody for contributing to the beginning of that debate for the first time in Parliament.

Motion agreed.