Energy: Climate Change

Lord Smith of Finsbury Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Smith of Finsbury]

My Lords, I begin by declaring an interest as chairman of the Environment Agency. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Haskel, because the starting point of this debate has to be recognition of the reality of climate change. In a way, it is also a pleasure to follow on from the earlier remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, because he highlighted some of the essential issues that we need to address. He appeared from his remarks to accept that there has been some warming over the course of the past 100 or 200 years. He appears to think that that process has stalled over the past 10 years or so—and with that analysis I am afraid I cannot agree. He also says that he has an open mind on whether the science tells us that there is going to be much more climate change to come. I find the science much more compelling than he does, but the problem I find with his argument is that he says, “Even if that is going to happen, it doesn’t matter”. I am afraid that it does matter.

In the Environment Agency, we are at the very point where environmental and climate change has its greatest impacts on people’s lives. We try and cope with flooding and flood risk. We try and cope with eroding coasts in Lincolnshire, Yorkshire and East Anglia and with the difficulties that are going to face farmers, industry and households in the east and south of the country in 20 years, when river flows are 50 per cent lower in summer months than they are now. These are going to be the realities of climate change. One does not have to look just at the dangers that face people in Bangladesh or the Maldives, or in Kenya or central Australia to see what climate change is likely to bring. We look at what is going to have an impact here, so I am afraid that to stand up and say, “We in this country will benefit from climate change”, profoundly misunderstands the nature of the threat and the impact that climate change is going to have.

There have of course been huge disappointments in the global response to climate change, especially at Copenhagen last year. I fear that the political disaster which I suspect is unfolding in the United States as we speak will make that challenge even worse; on that point, at least, the noble Lord was right. Yet that does not mean that we should simply walk away from the issue here in the UK or ignore our responsibility to continue to do what we can—not just to prepare to adapt to the challenge that climate change will bring us but to do everything that we possibly can, here in this country, to try and contribute to combating the causes of climate change in the first place. That is where energy policy becomes so important.

Any sensible energy policy in the light of this challenge has to be based on the triumvirate of renewables, nuclear and abated fossil-fuel technology. We do not particularly have time on our side in this. If we do not get a move on with renewables, do not develop the carbon capture and storage technologies that we need if we are to abate fossil fuel production and do not get ahead with building a new generation of nuclear power stations, we will end up with an energy gap in between 10 and 15 years that will, I suspect, prompt a dash for unabated gas in the same way that we responded a few decades ago. We do not have that much time to get this right, but we need to do so and the Government, I know, have the right intentions in this.

I want to touch briefly on three crucial issues. First, on nuclear I have to confess that I used to be a nuclear sceptic, but climate change has made a realist of me and I recognise that nuclear has to be part of the answer. However, there is one crucial issue to which we do not yet have the answer; what to do with the high-level, highly radioactive and very long-lasting waste that nuclear fission produces. There are proposals for the creation of a deep, secure repository for high-level nuclear waste, but the Government have been talking about the possibility of that not happening until 2040. That is far too long a timescale for us to be looking at. We need to get a move on, with a much greater sense of urgency, in securing the future safety and safeguarding of that high-level nuclear waste.

Secondly, on renewables we are not doing nearly enough at the moment on tidal and wave power development. The Government made absolutely the right decision not to go ahead with the original proposals for the barrage on the Severn estuary. This is the one point on which I find myself in disagreement with the noble Lord, Lord Giddens. Building a wall across the estuary from Weston-super-Mare to Cardiff would have caused untold damage to the ecology of not just the Severn itself but the Wye and the Usk as well. Not just the bird life but the fish life and the entire ecological stability of that river basin would have been affected. We have to make sure, however, that we can tap in to the extraordinary power of the Severn Estuary along with other estuaries, and more generally the waves and tides that surround our island. We are almost uniquely blessed with this potential resource of energy generation, and putting in place the research for the reefs, fences and underwater turbines that could be providing us with solutions in this respect is something to which we need to devote much more attention and energy.

Thirdly, there is the development of carbon capture and storage technology for traditional fossil-fuel power stations. We were, of course, going to have four demonstration projects—that is still the Government’s stated intention—but RWE has now pulled out of its development of a coal-fired power station at Tilbury, E.ON has pulled out of a coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth and Powerfuel has postponed its proposal for Hatfield in South Yorkshire, all of them saying that economic and financial considerations have made them either pause or abandon their proposals for abated coal technology. We are left with a small but rather important pilot that Scottish and Southern is putting in place at Ferrybridge and the one large-scale proposal, which is for a retrofit by ScottishPower at Longannet in Fife, adding CCS to an existing and relatively old power station. It is important that that proposal goes ahead, but one project on its own is not enough.

So what will happen now? Have we abandoned the principle of a levy in order to fund carbon capture and storage projects? Are we going to see any other coal-fired power stations with full-scale CCS attached? Heaven forbid that we should see any coal-fired power stations unabated, with no CCS attached. What does this mean for the potential economic wealth-providing export opportunities that the development of CCS technology could bring us as a country?

Perhaps most importantly of all, are we going to see carbon capture and storage developed and supported by the Government for new gas-fired power stations? If gas is indeed going to be the preferred energy source coming forward from the industry, and there appear to be indications that that may well be the case, then the need for CCS for gas to be tested, trialled and put into operation at scale will become essential.

Over the next 10 to 15 years in this country, we face a potential energy crisis if we do not do the right things over the next few years. We face a climate crisis over the next 40 years. There are some solutions to both of these crises, and a synergy is possible between those solutions. The Government must rededicate themselves to achieving them.