Energy: Climate Change

Baroness Parminter Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Parminter]

My Lords, the scientific findings about humanly induced climate change and the damage that it poses are widely acknowledged, although clearly not by all in this House. It is therefore right that the Government should have stated that they intend to be the greenest Government ever. This ambition is a global necessity.

The record to date on delivering on that ambition is to be applauded and not just by those on this side of the House. Prior to the release of the comprehensive spending review, Michael Jacobs, a visiting fellow on climate change at the LSE and a former adviser to Gordon Brown, posed three tests for the Government. The three tests were: a green investment bank; the development of carbon capture and storage technology; and stimulating a British wind turbine manufacturing sector. We know that on all three the Government gave the green light.

However, with the UK responsible for only 2 per cent of the world’s emissions, greater urgency is required on the international front. The Foreign Secretary recently called on foreign policy practitioners to,

“up our game in building a credible and effective response to climate change”.

The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change is working with European partners to secure a 30 per cent reduction target in carbon emissions. I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for his reply to my question in the House last week about the Government’s efforts to ensure that China and the United States demonstrate the necessary leadership on this issue at Cancun later this year. As the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, said, trying to engender a greater sense of urgency on the international front will be as critical as delivering a sustainable energy policy within the UK.

Many barriers remain to delivering such a sustainable energy policy. I want to focus on just one: public acceptance of new energy infrastructure such as power stations and wind farms. Now is the time to address this issue. If we do not address it at an early stage, we know only too well that we will face public opposition at the last stage when energy infrastructure proposals appear to be dropped on local communities.

We need to move away from debates that pitch respective sides as zealots and reactionaries. As we at last become serious about tackling climate change, we need to find ways in which to bring the public with us on the journey of transition to a low-energy Britain. To that end, I respectfully ask my noble friend the Minister to reflect on two things. The first is to start talking to the public about the choices that we face in a way that people understand. Bluntly, the communication strategy of the Department of Energy and Climate Change can be summed up as one of graphs, charts and gigawatts. We need to give people a positive vision of what a low-energy economy could look like and what the options are in terms of the intensity of land use and the changes that we will make to our natural and built environment. Landscape is the lens through which we see how our country is changing.

Other groups are trying to engage the public in this way, giving options of how Britain might look in the future. One such attempt is that by the Centre for Alternative Technology with its Zero Carbon Britain 2030. Its picture is of a British landscape very different from that which we have now. Now is the time for the Government to give their vision and engage with the public in a debate about what Britain could look like. A 2050 energy pathways calculator may help some to understand the scale of the challenge of decarbonisation, but, frankly, the department needs to do much more, using language and images that the people of our country understand and can relate to.

Secondly, by creating the right planning framework for land use decisions, people can be appropriately engaged while investors are given the certainty that they need to bring forward the right proposals in the right locations. The Government have made a welcome first step, as the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, said, in abolishing the previous Government’s Infrastructure Planning Commission, but we now need certainty—and soon—about a reformed planning system. I hope that the Minister will work closely with his colleagues to ensure that the decentralisation and localism Bill gives local communities the ability to shape the places in which they live and work, respecting the value of the country’s best landscapes and natural and historic environments while delivering a renewable energy revolution.

As part of that, continuing support is vital for innovative ways of engaging people in the planning process and for renewable technology capacity assessments at geographic levels to which the public can relate. Good examples of these are PlanLoCal, a programme of the Centre for Sustainable Energy, currently financed by the Department for Communities and Local Government, to encourage greater public access and participation in the planning process. Another example is Herefordshire’s 2026 renewables capacity study. These examples give people a real sense of the physical impact on their communities and landscapes early in the planning process and help them to accept necessary change.

The scientific case is clear for ensuring that our energy policy responds to the challenge of climate change. The Government have shown their commitment to dispensing their international responsibilities and unlocking the infrastructure to deliver low-carbon energy. The time is now to engage the public in delivering the necessary energy changes to ensure that global warming does not change our country for the worse.