Climate Change

Lord Rooker Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

My colleagues at Defra—my noble friend Lord Goldsmith, who led on this at COP, and my colleague Jo Churchill, who leads on climate change adaptation—and I would certainly be happy to meet the noble Lord to explain how we hope we are still on track for 1.5 degrees, while ensuring that we adapt to all the risks in the report we are responding to that we could face in the coming decades.

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

Does the Minister accept that one of the problems with renewables is intermittency of supply? Surely one way round that serious problem for the next decade would be to use gas like we do now but capture the carbon. The Government have never taken carbon capture and storage seriously and are now putting all their eggs in the hydrogen basket. Carbon capture and storage will enable us to deal with the intermittency, I accept by burning a fossil fuel, but allow no carbon to go into the atmosphere. Why are the Government so reluctant to push carbon capture and storage?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The Government have co-financed a number of research projects on this. It remains a technology that has potential. We are working to understand it, its viability and all its implications to ensure that our infrastructure in the North Sea can be used as we develop it.