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.

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.