Methane (Environment and Climate Change Committee Report)
Baroness Sheehan Excerpts(2 weeks, 1 day ago)
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Baroness Sheehan
That this House takes note of the Report from the Environment and Climate Change Committee Methane: keep up the momentum (HL Paper 45).
Baroness Sheehan (LD)
My Lords, it is indeed a pleasure, as chair, to debate the findings of the Environment and Climate Change Committee’s report, Methane: Keep Up the Momentum, about a devastating greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide and one that is responsible for about 30% of global warming to date. Yet the evidence we gathered shows that the story is one that offers hope because methane, although very powerful in its warming impact, is short-lived and, therefore, if we can reduce emissions, we can substantially slow down global warming within decades, and with greater ambition we could start to cool the planet. Professor Piers Forster, interim chair of the Government’s advisory body, the Climate Change Committee, stressed that rapidly reducing methane emissions alongside addressing carbon dioxide could reduce the current trajectory of global warming from 0.25 degrees Celsius per decade to 0.1 degrees Celsius per decade, and that is a goal worth achieving.
The good news is that we already know how to capture, bottle and sell the emissions from two of the highest emitting sectors globally: oil and gas, and waste management. Emissions from agriculture are more challenging to capture, but there is light on the horizon to reduce them, as highlighted in the report. The key thing about methane, otherwise known as natural gas, is that it has value. We use it to heat our homes, cook our food and produce electricity. It is the transition fuel that will bridge our move to renewable energy, so why vent and flare it when we could harness and use it? This is what makes this report so important and one that the Government must not leave to gather dust, which is the fate of so many excellent Select Committee reports, but instead to use it to lend momentum to the already excellent, but currently stalled, record of reducing methane emissions in the UK and, importantly—and this is the crux of the report—to use our know-how, experience and ambition to leverage action internationally, as we have undertaken to do in the Global Methane Pledge.
We heard evidence that there is potential to scale up cutting-edge products of UK companies as they deploy innovative tools to measure, monitor and verify emissions. In short, with the right policy and regulatory framework we can support growth in our economy and generate jobs, while reducing methane emissions and keeping warming within the goals of the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees Celsius. I hope that the Minister will agree to meet me so that I can introduce him to one such company in the space sector, where huge strides are being made to measure the intensity of methane emissions and locate them with pinpoint accuracy. This will be a game-changer.
The purpose of the report was to evaluate progress made on the domestic side to tackle the sources of anthropogenic methane emissions that are within the scope of the Global Methane Pledge and to get to grips with the potential for the UK to do more both at home and internationally where there is so much low-hanging fruit. Will the Minister state whether he has fully bought into the commitment of the Government led by Boris Johnson, when, at the COP 26 summit in Glasgow, they wholeheartedly supported the launch of the Global Methane Pledge to reduce global methane emissions by at least 30% by 2030 from a 2020 baseline? If the Minister is fully signed up to support the Global Methane Pledge, on what basis can he justify the Government’s refusal to publish their own methane action plan to provide clarity on priority actions for each sector? I hope he will not point to an as yet non-existent carbon budget delivery plan because that will not suffice. We ask for a clear, stand-alone document to encourage other countries to produce the same. Such an important intervention to combat the climate emergency cannot be buried in a wide-ranging document such as the Carbon Budget Delivery Plan, where one has to dig hard to discern the Government’s intent. The Minister may also point to these country’s co-chairship with Brazil of the Climate and Clean Air Coalition, the UN-affiliated organisation that provides a secretariat for the Global Methane Pledge. I am truly delighted that Minister Kerry McCarthy has taken up this role discarded by the US in January.
As my committee’s methane report makes clear, domestically we have made good progress in reducing methane emissions from the waste management and oil and gas sectors, but less so in agriculture. Residual emissions may be more stubborn and therefore more costly. However, it is the Government’s role to balance the cost of action with the cost of inaction over the long term. That point is made throughout the report.
I turn to the waste sector. The UK’s success in reducing methane from the waste sector was driven in large part by the landfill tax. Together with incentives from the renewables obligation scheme, which improved landfill gas capture, the UK saw a 76% decrease in emissions between 1990 and 2022. Colleagues speaking after me may wish to say more on the important issues of waste crime, the renewable obligation scheme, anaerobic digesters and other matters. I hope the Minister, however, will take this opportunity to reiterate his Government’s determination to bear down on upstream measures such as reducing food and packaging waste, given the greater stress that this Government are placing on moving faster towards a more circular economy. Our technical ability to tackle emissions from landfill sites is world-beating. There is much that we can share internationally. Later this year, COP 30 is taking place in Brazil, where there is opportunity to leverage our knowledge and expertise to work with Latin American countries as they consider their policy options for landfill gas capture. I hope we will lean into this with gusto and lend our expertise.
Moving to agriculture, almost half the UK’s methane emissions can be attributed to agriculture, all of it from livestock. The 15% reduction in emissions since 1990 can be attributed largely to reduced consumption of red meat. However, the committee heard that there are other viable methods for further meaningful cuts in emissions, such as improved animal welfare, selective breeding, methane-suppressing feed additives and better slurry management. Can the Minister assure me that Defra takes the issue of methane emissions seriously? Defra is not the responsible government department for greenhouse gas emissions and, therefore, methane reduction just does not seem to be high on its list of priorities. In their response to recommendation 10—that low-cost, long-term solutions must be prioritised, with supermarkets playing their part in reducing emissions from the food sector—the Government said:
“Alongside the upcoming food strategy and farming roadmap we will deliver a credible plan to decarbonise food and farming”.
Will the Minister say when can we expect to see the food strategy and farming road map?
Similarly, the Government are reviewing the regulatory framework that they inherited—thank goodness, because our report highlighted grave shortcomings in the existing framework. For example, I hope that the review will address the fact that there is no regulatory oversight of agricultural methane, apart from in some aspects of agricultural waste.
I move on to energy. In my view, one of the most important recommendations in the report is to,
“demand greater transparency and accountability of industry commitments to end the routine venting and flaring of methane”
by
“a publicly accessible roadmap and transparent data”.
This is something that the industry has committed to do, as was restated by the NSTA when it gave evidence to the committee. However, the Government’s response did not address the points about transparent data or a road map for the industry; perhaps the Minister could take this opportunity to do so now.
I say this because international emissions from the oil and gas sector continue to grow, yet the gas that is routinely vented and flared could be captured and sold. Professor Steven Hamburg of Environmental Defense Fund told the committee that oil and gas have “enormous potential” for methane reduction globally. He also said:
“That is not low-hanging fruit; that is fruit lying on the ground”.
Can the Minister provide an update on progress in how methane from the upstream oil and gas sector could be included in the ETS scheme? I hope that progress is being made on that.
In concluding, I stress that the report would have been challenging to get over the line in the best of circumstances. However, during it, we lost our policy analyst, Flo Bullough, midway; we then lost our clerk, Emily Bailey Page, towards the end of the report’s finalisation. Such talented people will always be in demand. I would like to put on the record my gratitude to them for their sterling input. I must thank wholeheartedly all those who stepped into the breach, including Tom Wilson, the principal clerk of Select Committees, the incoming clerk, Andrea Ninomiya, and our policy analyst, Lily Paulson. They were magnificent in picking up the baton and ushering the report over the finish line, and I thank them all once again.
This report holds the dubious record of being the longest-debated report to be produced by any House of Lords committee, which will give your Lordships a flavour of the divergent views of the committee. I wholeheartedly commend my colleagues on the committee for the unfailing courtesy with which all discussions were undertaken. There is real value in bringing together the threads of different viewpoints in a report that all members felt able to sign up to and one of which I, for one, am very proud. I beg to move.
Baroness Sheehan (LD)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his response. I thank all contributors for their valuable and well-thought-out responses to this report; they are very much appreciated. I expected no less from my esteemed colleagues on the committee because their participation in the discussions, as well as the engaged way in which their contributions were made during our deliberations, left me in no doubt that we would have a very good debate today.
I thank the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, for his contribution in the gap. His point—and that of the noble Lord, Lord Jay—about the disturbing international scenario in which we now find ourselves will prove a challenge in terms of tackling not just methane emissions but carbon dioxide emissions. I was a bit heartened by China’s recent announcement that it will not ease up on its efforts to tackle climate change. Indeed, at a UN summit as a precursor to the COP 30 meeting, it announced that its NDC, which will be due some time before COP 30, will encompass sector-wide emissions across the economy; that was heartening to hear. Not only will they cover the whole economy: they will cover all greenhouse gases, including methane. We will wait with interest to see the detail.
I will not detain noble Lords too long—I am sure that we all need to move on—but I stress the need for better communication to farmers, which the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, mentioned. There was consensus on this from the NFU, the Nature Friendly Farming Network, and the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board. Without farmers on board, we will not get to grips with methane either at home or abroad.
I am not going to go into detail on the other contributions, save to say that I was heartened by what I heard. Let me just leave noble Lords with the thought that carbon dioxide concentrations are increasing in the atmosphere. The Mauna Loa Observatory—I hope that NOAA does not get to erase all this data—has been monitoring carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. It has not been monitoring it for the past 800,000 years, but we have data from ice cores in Antarctica that shows that from a steady baseline of 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide before the Industrial Revolution, we have seen, in terms of ecological time, a straight-line increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide to today’s average of 426 parts per million.
We are in uncharted territory, so tackling the short-term but powerful greenhouse gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide, are our route to avoiding some of the disastrous tipping points that we are otherwise hurtling towards. We have an opportunity to buy time, and we should take it. I beg to move.
Grangemouth Oil Refinery
Baroness Sheehan Excerpts(2 months ago)
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Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend and of course I am very much aware of Unite’s proposal to transition Grangemouth into a sustainable aviation fuel plant. We are very grateful for the input from Unite and will continue to engage with the union. I have to say, though, that I think the Project Willow approach is the best way forward. It evaluated over 300 technologies and identified nine potential technologies. We have £200 million available from the National Wealth Fund to invest. The focus at the moment is twofold. One is to give support to the workers who are going to lose their jobs. The second is to encourage private investors to look at these proposals. We have the National Wealth Fund, with £200 million to invest, to act as an incentive and we are working very hard in relation to that.
Baroness Sheehan (LD)
My Lords, I draw the House’s attention to my role as chair of the Environment and Climate Change Committee. What will be the process by which the preferred option or options will be chosen out of the nine front-runners identified by Project Willow? To what extent will the Circular Economy Taskforce be involved in the decision-making?
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, Project Willow set out nine potential developments. The most near-term developments include hydrothermal plastic recycling, dissolution plastics recycling and ABE bio-refining. On the question about the task force, I will certainly discuss with my colleagues the ability of the task force to input into this. Clearly, in terms of decision-making, the key thing now is to find investors for those projects. Clearly, the National Wealth Fund, with the £200 million that it is going to make available, will play an important role in that.
UK Energy: Grid Decarbonisation
Baroness Sheehan Excerpts(2 months ago)
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Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, the noble Lord will know that through Urenco, at Capenhurst, we are investing a considerable amount of money into the HALEU programme to enable us to have the whole fuel cycle undertaken in the United Kingdom. This is good for energy security and good for exports. I understand the point that the noble Viscount makes about uranium. We are confident in the future supply, but I acknowledge his underlying point of the importance of nuclear energy as an essential baseload.
Captain of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms and Chief Whip (Lord Kennedy of Southwark) (Lab Co-op)
My Lords, it is the turn of the Lib Dem Benches.
Baroness Sheehan (LD)
Does the Minister agree that consumers choosing green electricity as their preferred source of power is a powerful driving force for the increasingly rapid uptake of electric vehicles, for example, given that UK EV sales increased by more than 20% last year? Surely it is far better than relying on fossil fuel generation from unstable regions such as the Middle East and Russia for long-term energy security.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I totally agree with the noble Baroness that the wholesale move to electrification, not just in power generation but in transport, industrial processes and home heating, will lead us to be much more energy secure. We will ensure that we make the contribution we need to make to deal with climate change and we can grow the economy and bring thousands more green jobs to this country.
Licensed Oil and Gas Fields: Emissions
Baroness Sheehan Excerpts(2 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, the best way to deal with energy prices is to move from being utterly reliant on international gas prices subject to the volatility that has arisen from the invasion of Ukraine by Putin. That is why we must move towards clean power as soon as we possibly can, to give ourselves energy security.
I cannot answer that question in relation to Rosebank and Jackdaw. The original consent decisions were subject to judicial review, which was paused pending the outcome of the Finch judgment. In the light of the Finch judgment, as I have said, we are consulting on new environmental impact assessments. When we have produced those, it will then be up to developers to make applications for consents according to the new guidelines we have produced. I cannot forecast the outcome of that process.
Baroness Sheehan (LD)
My Lords, who in government is responsible for collecting the data on spillages from the oil and gas industry operations in the UK? Scope 3 emissions take account primarily of greenhouse gas emissions, but they also take account of pollution. How do the Government deal with pollution, particularly in marine protected areas due to those spillages?
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, in relation to the North Sea, the Offshore Petroleum Regulator for Environment and Decommissioning has an important role to play in the work that is undertaken on oil and gas. Of course, we have wider environmental law. Defra has a role to play. The Department for Transport—obviously, in relation to the tragic incident that has taken place—also has a role to play. On the point the noble Baroness raised, there has to be a cross-government approach to protecting biodiversity and the health of our seas. My department certainly plays its part in that.
Climate Change
Baroness Sheehan Excerpts(2 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Baroness Sheehan
To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to promote action against climate change internationally following reports that 2024 was the warmest year on record globally.
The Minister of State, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (Lord Hunt of Kings Heath) (Lab)
My Lords, the Government are committed to driving forward action on climate change. At COP 29 we announced an ambitious target to reduce emissions by at least 81% by 2035, and we will continue to urge other countries to be as ambitious.
Baroness Sheehan (LD)
My Lords, last December the Environment and Climate Change Committee, which I chair, published its report on methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in its first decade. It is quite extraordinary that fully one-third of the global warming seen to date is due to methane, but methane is short-lived and its potency reduces rapidly, so we could slow near-term warming by cutting global methane emissions. Under UK leadership at COP 26 in Glasgow, the global methane pledge was signed, thanks in no small measure to the leadership of the noble Lord, Lord Sharma, who I am pleased to see in his place.
A noble Lord
Baroness Sheehan (LD)
It is coming. It committed us to work with others to reduce global methane emissions by 30% by 2030. So can the Minister justify why, in their response to the Methane: Keep Up the Momentum report, the Government ruled out publishing a methane action plan for the UK, a key requisite for global climate leadership?
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, the noble Baroness will know that we welcomed the report of her committee. We have provided a full written government response, including how we will support internal action to deliver on the global methane pledge. She will also know that we have included methane policies in our delivery plan for carbon budgets and will contribute towards the global methane pledge. I think that shows decisive action, and we are going to take strong international leadership to deliver against that pledge.
Gas Storage Levels
Baroness Sheehan Excerpts(4 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
For a very long time, we have taken supplies from Norway. It is surely a great advantage of our system that we can look to a diversity of supply. The North Sea supply has been declining over many years now; if it were not in that situation we could, where we needed gas in the future, just look there, but that is not the position. That is why we are trying to manage a transition which recognises that the North Sea still has a contribution to make. The essential point here is that we move as quickly as possible to clean power. That is the best way to get to homegrown energy, which I think the noble Baroness is really pointing to.
Baroness Sheehan (LD)
I wonder if I can move on to the need for warm homes. Heat pumps are very efficient in heating homes—every kilowatt of electricity generates three to four kilowatts of heat—yet cheaper electricity from renewables ends up being a more expensive option to heat homes than gas because the price of electricity is tied to the high price of gas. Does the Minister agree that this situation is nonsensical and that electricity prices must be decoupled from the price of gas?
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
That is a very wide question, and it is of course a matter that we should always keep under review. It is a situation that has existed for some time and which we inherited from the previous Government. On the substantive point, the noble Baroness is right about heat pumps and home insulation. We clearly need to make great progress on that.
King’s Speech
Baroness Sheehan Excerpts(10 months, 1 week ago)
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Baroness Sheehan (LD)
My Lords, I congratulate the new Government on their very handsome general election victory. I also congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, on her government position and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, on his new portfolio. He was a dark horse in that I knew little of the force of his convictions on the crucial issue of climate change that afflicts our planet. I hoped to learn more today, as I believe I have. Nevertheless, questions remain about whether he is truly prepared to put his shoulder to the wheel and deliver the transformative changes needed on so many fronts in the short time remaining to us, it being often repeated that this is the last decade in which decisive action can save the planet. I give him the benefit of the doubt. However, much rests on the shoulders of this Government. We on this side of the House will do our best to hold their feet to the fire to meet the challenges of climate change and nature across all sectors.
I also express my commiserations to the Conservative Benches, but I rather suspect that some of them view the result of the general election with relief, in that they can now sort out their internal differences outside the full glare of government. I hope they do so with speed, because this momentous issue needs an Opposition who speak with one voice. The country deserves to know whether they believe in the speedy transformative changes needed, or whether the deniers and delayers within their party will win the day.
I start my contribution to this new Parliament with a few thoughts on the severity of the threat we face from climate change and its provenance, because therein lies the answer. In my view, climate change is an existential crisis. There is no denying its cause: the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere started with the Industrial Revolution, led by Britain, a mere 170 years or so ago.
The rapid release of long-buried carbon through the burning of fossil fuels has violently disrupted the balance of carbon flows between rocks and soil, the oceans and our atmosphere. The fact is that when we humans burn these fuels, vast amounts of carbon dioxide are released back into the atmosphere. This excess carbon changes our climate, increasing global temperatures, causing ocean acidification and disrupting the planet’s ecosystems and weather patterns. The devastation wrought on our planet’s natural balance system is everywhere for us to witness.
At the same time as we witness extreme weather events and natural disasters increase in frequency and intensity, we watch the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere go up and up. National Geographic tells us that, on 9 May in 2013, the Mauna Loa Observatory recorded a long-awaited climate milestone: the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceeded 400 parts per million for the first time in 55 years of measurement, and probably for the first time in more than 3 million years of earth’s history. The last time the concentration of earth’s main greenhouse gas reached this mark, the seas were at least 9.1 metres —around 30 feet—higher. That is a level that would today inundate major cities around the world.
But here is the thing—then, carbon dioxide concentrations were on their way down. Today, we are in a very different scenario, because 400 parts per million is a mere milestone on a rapid uphill climb into uncharted territory. Until the 20th century, concentrations of carbon dioxide had not exceeded 300 parts per million, let alone 400 parts per million, for at least 800,000 years. That is how far back scientists have been able to measure carbon dioxide directly in bubbles of ancient air trapped in Antarctic ice cores. However, last month, in June 2024, the measured concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 427 parts per million. That should give us all pause for thought.
It is important to have this information recorded in Hansard because we know what we will do if we continue with business as usual, and as the world continues to burn fossil fuels at an increasing pace. The tragic fact is that global carbon dioxide emissions rose again in 2023, reaching record levels.
I believe this Government get it. Their manifesto spoke about tackling the nonsensical position in which we find ourselves regarding our dependence on energy sources from unstable regions in an uncertain world, which not just endangers our energy security but saddles our nation with unsustainable energy prices, all the while exacerbating the climate crisis.
I welcome the Government’s Great British Energy Bill to boost investment in clean power, but will the Minister tell us why the energy independence Bill has been shelved? There are other notable omissions from the King’s Speech, but I shall restrict my remarks to this sector. The Great British Energy Bill does not tackle the imbalance in the energy sector enjoyed by fossil fuel producers. There are a number of inequities in favour of the fossil fuel industry. One is MER—maximising economic recovery of oil and gas in the UK continental shelf; another is the subsidies and support enjoyed historically by the sector from various Governments. Yet another is the artificially high price of electricity.
When can we expect the Government’s priorities to turn to these matters? After all, the Labour manifesto undertook to implement the UK’s G7 pledge to end fossil fuel subsidies. When can we expect that to happen? Labour’s manifesto states:
“We will not issue new licences to explore new fields because they will not take a penny off bills, cannot make us energy secure, and will only accelerate the worsening climate crisis. In addition, we will not grant new coal licences and will ban fracking for good”.
These are fine words, which I welcome, but where is the legislation to follow through with this critical action? When can we expect news on what the Government intend to do to decouple electricity prices from the wholesale gas price? In March last year, the Guardian reported, based on research commissioned by the Liberal Democrats, that the UK Government had
“given £20bn more in support to fossil fuel producers than those of renewables since 2015”.
Can the Minister promise that such articles will now be a thing of the past?
That old adage, “Where there’s muck there’s brass” holds true today in the fight against climate change. While there are profits still to be made in fossil fuels, unscrupulous people will reap those benefits, and they have shown that they do not care how mucky they get. They must be made aware that their time is up. We must turn off the tap and stop adding ever more carbon into our atmosphere, or future generations will never forgive us.