Climate Agenda

Debate between Lord Deben and Lord Lilley

Thursday 24th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[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.