Climate Agenda

Lord Oates Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[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.