Renewable Energy: Costs

Lord Oates Excerpts

Thursday 14th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, I welcome this debate and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Frost, for initiating it. It follows our recent debate initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, and it feels a bit like it is a band reunion with some of the stars missing. We rehearsed a number of arguments from last time.

The noble Lord, Lord Frost, protests that his position is not ideological, but I am afraid that I do not really buy that. He told us in his speech the other week:

“In my view, we are not in a climate emergency”.—[Official Report, 24/10/24; col. 769.]


I think science would beg to differ from that. I am all for us having the most open debates; we should have had greater debates on these issues, particularly at the time that we adopted net zero. That was the right thing to do, but we did not have sufficient debate. However, it is important that those debates seek to illuminate rather than to obfuscate the issues, and I fear that that is often what the noble Lords, Lord Frost and Lord Lilley, organisations such as the Global Warming Policy Foundation and others seek to do, a bit like what the tobacco industry sought to do, confusing all the science—and we all know the cost of that.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, quoted that old adage about knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. But in a way, the noble Lord, Lord Frost, disputes the price of everything but he knows the cost of nothing. We heard very convincingly from Lord Browne about the realities of these costs. We know that from the figures that are provided by the Government, which I have heard some noble Lords on the Official Opposition Benches disputing, but which were quoted by the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, in his speech last week or the week before. What he did not do was compare like with like; he took one figure which he had taken off the carbon price on gas and compared it with something else which was not in the graph and which told a completely different story. That is not very illuminating.

The noble Lord, Lord Hain, described the noble Lord, Lord Stern, speaking at a Cabinet meeting some years ago and making clear that the costs of inaction were much greater than the costs of acting: that the costs of combating climate change would be high—that is true—but the costs of not doing so would be higher.

The noble Lord, Lord Frost, did not talk at all about the external costs of burning carbon fuels. We have known a long time about those impacts. In fact, as long ago as 1965, in a report from the President’s Science Advisory Committee to President Lyndon Johnson, that council warned that the burning of fossil fuels

“may be sufficient to produce measurable and perhaps marked changes in climate”

by the year 2000. As we know from internal papers of Exxon, the oil company, which were exposed by Inside Climate News, the oil companies knew about this very well themselves. In May 1981, an internal memo from Exxon stated:

“We estimate now that the doubling time”


for CO₂ in the atmosphere

“is about 100 years. This permits time for an orderly transition to non-fossil fuel technologies should restrictions on fossil fuel use be deemed necessary”.

The memo went on to predict a

“3°C global average temperature rise and 10°C degrees at the poles if CO₂ doubles … Major shifts in rainfall/agriculture … polar ice … melt”.

A number of presentations, documents and memos internally in those companies, with the American Petroleum Institute, which made clear the dangers of globally catastrophic effects.

However, we know what happened. After that time, companies such as Exxon, which had been very forward-looking in research on the impacts of carbon dioxide, suddenly changed their leadership on that and went about the process not of continuing to research—it closed down its research on that—but seeking others to do research to try to undermine climate science, the very climate science some of which they had pioneered. It is very much like big tobacco. We need to bear that in mind. Those costs were known about, and if we had acted earlier, the costs we would be dealing with now would be much easier.

The noble Baroness, Lady Finn, quite rightly talked about costs to households. We have to think about how we move into this transition, which is why it is so important that we have the real facts available and that we do it in a way that is as fair and has as least impact as possible on individuals. However, as she may know, average household expenditure on energy actually fell between 2013 and 2020. A lot of that was to do with measures that had been taken in the coalition Government through the levies in terms of energy efficiency of people’s homes and reducing energy consumption, and that should be a key area that we focus on.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich made the important point that the most vulnerable and the least resilient nations are likely to be the most impacted by climate change. On the costs, the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, last week stated:

“If continuing to do nothing … were likely to result in the extinction of the human race, or even its immiseration, almost no costs would be too great to avoid it”.


However, he went on to say that he had put down a question to the Government some time ago about

“whether they knew of any peer-reviewed science, or science produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—whose job it is to consider the science—which forecasts that, if we do nothing over the coming centuries, it will lead to the extinction of the human race or even its immiseration”.—[Official Report, 24/10/24; cols. 795-96.]

But he did not actually ask that question. What he asked was whether there was any peer-reviewed science which said that the human population would be exterminated within the next century, and of course he got the answer, no. Again, it is this obfuscation of the actual facts.

When I think about the external costs, I think about some of the kids I taught many years ago in a school in Zimbabwe, which I mentioned last time. Shortly after my father died, that school, very movingly, sent me a photograph of a playground it had built and dedicated to his memory. At the bottom of the slide there is a six year-old little girl with a big smile—it is a beautiful picture. I think of that person, who has contributed almost nothing to the carbon in the atmosphere, but who will be one of the people most impacted by what we do, and to whom we have a moral obligation.

In a post on Facebook, one of the pupils I had previously taught was not talking about climate change; he was explaining why the school was named after St James. The Anglicans had this habit of naming a mission after a saint, but also adding the area where the mission was situated. In our case it was St James Zongoro. The name Zongoro is from the river, but the river is slowly dying because of climate change. That river is dry most of the time. They cannot feed their fish ponds any more, and they are increasingly impacted by severe weather events. It is those vulnerable people who are one of the reasons why we have to continue with this. We have been a leader in renewable energy; we should continue to be so, and we should be honest and open about the costs of doing that, the benefits and the values.