Low-carbon Growth Links (China)
Debate between Barry Gardiner and Lord Lilley(11 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)
Criminologists have observed that the victims of confidence tricksters are often willing—indeed, eager—to believe the story to which they fall victim, and the more absurd, fantastic or fabulous the story, the more willing they are to believe it. The report is an example of a confidence trick that has been willingly absorbed by the Government and members of the Committee. It contains all the characteristics necessary for the sort of fairy tale in which one wants to believe: it has a faraway country, mysterious powers that we attribute to ourselves, and pots of gold—green gold—at the end of the rainbow.
The first delusion affirmed by the report is the delusion of power. It is a strange hangover from liberal imperialism that the British intellectual classes believe that they can still dominate the world—that the world is anxious to hear from them, and will jump to attention at their every word and follow their every command. Take the opening words of the report:
“China is central to global efforts to tackle climate change”—
true, but it continues, and I ask Members to savour these words—
“and should be at the heart of HMG’s climate change mitigation strategy.”
What imperialist arrogance and what delusions of grandeur that the United Kingdom, a nation of 65 million people off the coast of Europe, could somehow direct, guide or in any substantive way influence the policies of the largest nation in the world, with 1.3 billion people, on the other side of the globe.
How are we to achieve that remarkable feat? The summary refers to
“our leadership role in China”.
Members should also savour those words. I read about the change of leadership in China last year, but I did not realise that that involved the replacement of Xi Jin Ping by “Greg Bar Ker” and “Ed Da Vey”—they apparently now have a leadership role in China to which the Chinese are now anxious to respond. The report states that, sadly, our
“leadership role in China is being undermined by our ‘image’…The UK’s image is also tarnished by the reputation of being ‘all talk and no action’.”
I wish it were all talk and no action in this country. When people who do not like windmills—I quite like them—look across our countryside and find that they blight the horizon, they wish there was more talk and less action. When people pay their household bills, they wish there was more talk and less action. Abroad, however, the word has apparently got out that we do not really mean what we say. I do not know how that has happened, but it will apparently be made worse if we do not inflict more problems on ourselves, because the report states:
“Slowing the pace of decarbonisation at home could undermine…the credibility of UK leadership on climate change.”
The second delusion is about China’s decarbonisation policy. The British intelligentsia has always been capable of convincing itself that China is a paragon of whatever is the current fashionable virtue. When I was at Cambridge, Professor Joan Robinson used to dress in a Mao suit and teach us that China had shown us a new economic model that we could all follow. Now it is doing the same on climate change. The report states:
“China has set out some of the most ambitious decarbonisation plans in the world.”
Yet, it also states that,
“half the growth in energy-related emissions from now until 2030 will come from China.”
Half that growth will come from the country that is pursuing the most ambitious decarbonisation policy in the world, and by 2030
“China could account for half of the world’s emissions.”
I submit that those two views are incompatible. Either China is pursuing the most ambitious decarbonisation policy in the world, in which case one assumes that it will decarbonise—or at least match our skills in reducing, or preventing the growth in, carbon emissions—or it will not.
Why is that rosy view of China’s emissions policies peddled? The British public have to be convinced that China’s emissions are under control. The report admits:
“The UK’s emissions reduction efforts are negligible compared with emissions increases elsewhere.”
In 2011, the increase in emissions from China exceeded the UK’s total emissions by 200 million tonnes. The device used in the report to convince us all that the Chinese are pursuing an ambitious decarbonisation policy is, first, to glide from talking about reducing emissions to talking about reducing emissions growth, which is not quite the same thing, and, secondly, to equate reduction in carbon intensity with cutting carbon emissions, which is not the same thing at all.
Like any sensible country, China of course wants more economic output from every tonne of fuel or joule of energy used. It enjoyed steady reductions in carbon intensity until the beginning of this century—not that it had any particular plan for CO2 reductions; it just used energy more efficiently each year—but for some reason that stopped early in this century, and it now has plans to return to the same path of increasing energy efficiency each year. Despite such increasing energy efficiency, however, it will experience major rises in energy use and carbon emissions.
The third delusion is the prospect of green jobs in the UK resulting from exports to China. That prospect depends on the UK inflicting on itself severe and ambitious measures to decarbonise the UK economy. The report states:
“Slowing the pace of decarbonisation at home could undermine our low-carbon businesses and the export opportunities for this sector”.
What are the opportunities? The report states that the
“inquiry identified three sectors where…the UK has an established lead”.
What are they? The first is the oil and gas sector. It is true that we have expertise in oil and gas, but I would not have thought of it as a typical green sector. Indeed, the report states that,
“British expertise could help to ensure that”
Chinese resources are used
“in the most sustainable way possible. The UK’s own emissions profile has been improved by the ‘switch to gas’ and…a similar switch could be achieved in China, reducing emissions between 50% and 70%. Significant potential for gas development lies in the exploitation of unconventional resources.”
The report mentions shale gas in China, but not much encouragement has been given to that in this country, where we have had an 18-month moratorium and no drilling so far. None the less, the Committee’s report, which the Government have endorsed, believes:
“UK skills in the emerging market for unconventional ‘shale’ gas could help China to diversify its energy mix away from coal.”
Anything further from reality than the suggestion that we, who have held back shale gas development in this country and who—as we are told by the Committee, which has carried out an investigation—lack the expertise and will take a long time to develop our own resources, if they are there, can nevertheless help the Chinese to do so and then count that as a green export, would seem to me to be pretty bizarre.
The second sector is low-carbon buildings, primarily their design. That is fair enough. Let us send a few designers and architects over there and get the Chinese to pay their fees, but it will not revolutionise the British economy.
Interestingly, the third sector is carbon capture and storage. We are actually paying the Chinese to help them to develop the technology, and the report says that they already have a plant up and running. The idea that somehow the result is going to be us exporting carbon capture and storage technology to them when we are helping them develop a technology in which they are already further ahead than we are is bizarre.
Barry Gardiner
Am I right in thinking that the right hon. Gentleman genuinely believes that the expertise that this country has built up both from the North sea oilfields and in drilling in that technology is not something that we can export to China in helping them to develop shale gas?
Mr Lilley
What is wrong with it is that such expertise has nothing to do with green exports. It is a delusion, and a deliberate delusion, to portray exports of expertise in oil and gas development as a green export. If the hon. Gentleman cannot see that, it takes my breath away.
Have we got the expertise in shale gas? We have not developed any shale gas in this country, onshore or offshore. So if we have expertise, it comes from operating in other countries and we may be able to transfer that to China, but again, it would not be a green export—although I can see that the Minister is about to tell me otherwise.
UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
Debate between Barry Gardiner and Lord Lilley(11 years, 7 months ago)
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Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)
Mr Turner, it is a great pleasure to speak in this debate under your chairmanship. I should declare my interests, such as they are. They are non-pecuniary, but I am the chairman of the board of GLOBE International, which has already been referenced in this debate.
There is one thing at least on which I agree with the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley), and that is that those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. I wonder whether he would agree with me on another epithet, or epigram: just as the stone age did not end because of a lack of stone, so the oil age will not end because of a shortage of oil. But while we have many fossil fuel resources left in the world that we are able to mine and access, and which countries are seeking ever more to discover the resources to dig or pump up and use, none the less there will be a time, I think, when we realise that the effects of doing so are such that we have to desist.
I will focus my remarks more clearly on the UNFCCC itself and the process of the UNFCCC. I begin by outlining why a change in climate should matter at all. The UNFCCC is the United Nations framework convention on climate change and the world has occupied itself with this problem of climate change for a very long time now; why should we? It is certainly the most complex and intractable question of justice that the world has ever seen, in that it is not simply about justice between peoples separated by geography and wealth, but about justice between peoples separated in time, across the generations. It has proved a singularly intractable problem to reconcile those competing interests.
Why does a change in climate matter? In and of itself it should not, were it not for the fact that species—biodiversity—find it difficult to keep pace with the rate of climate change. What we have seen is a change in the rate of extinctions in the modern era that has gathered pace to such an extent that we now have, in comparison with the fossil record, a 1,000% increase in the rate of extinctions. That is higher than in any other period in the whole of the fossil record. We are living in the midst of that, and sometimes when living in the midst of things it is difficult to see the wood for the trees; but that is what is going on. The rate of extinctions that we are experiencing is really quite remarkable.
Mr Lilley
Does the hon. Gentleman recognise that although extinctions are taking place, particularly localised extinctions, they are almost exclusively due to change in habitat as a result of economic development, not as a result of change in temperature? I believe that only one species is known to have been rendered extinct by a change in temperature.
Barry Gardiner
No, I do not accept that at all—not at all—because if the right hon. Gentleman looks at marine life in the oceans, he will see what is happening in tropical coral reefs because of the changes in temperature in the oceans. Whole ecosystems are quite simply being destroyed by the changes in temperature in the oceans.
Mr Lilley
The hon. Gentleman said that we were living through the biggest extinction since perhaps the Palaeozoic era, and he implied that that was through climate change, but he has been unable to cite a single species that has been rendered extinct through climate change. I invite him to do so, or to give me a source where I could find that information.
