Climate Agenda
Lord Strathcarron Excerpts(1 month, 4 weeks ago)
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Lord Strathcarron (Con)
My Lords, I too am grateful to my noble friend Lord Lilley for securing this debate. The main impact of the Government’s climate agenda is to import pollution and to export jobs, growth and prosperity, and the two are directly linked.
Turning first to importing pollution, since 1990 our share of CO2 emissions embedded in imports has risen from just over 10% to nearly 50%. The very fact that we import half our emissions should give us pause for thought, but, unfortunately, we are moving in the opposite direction. The decision to cease all new oil and gas licences can only mean that, in future, we will need to import even more oil and gas to make up for our own self-induced shortfalls.
Whether we like it or not, fossil fuels are here to stay for the foreseeable future. Even the Government’s own assessment suggests that, by 2040, the demand for natural gas will decrease by only 4%. This simply means that any domestic reduction in emissions will be made possible only by offshoring the production, and of course the jobs, to other countries. Furthermore, the imported fuels will need to be liquefied—itself a polluting process, alongside the emissions caused by shipping them here—and then there is further pollution from processing them after they have landed here.
While Ministers may be able to stand up at international conferences and proudly proclaim that our domestic emissions have reduced, these same policies have in fact only contributed to increasing global emissions. One might say that, as we produce only 1% of the world’s emissions, it does not really matter and that the gesture is more important than the reality. However, it is a mighty counterproductive gesture with a direct, negative impact on our standard of living and quality of life.
Turning to jobs, growth and prosperity, as has been well publicised, the UK now has the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world, which is directly caused by artificially penalising industrial and domestic consumers with subsidies for renewable energy, carbon pricing and the extra infrastructure costs as a direct result of the policy. The OBR suggests that subsidies for renewables will add £12 billion to our bills for this year alone—and it will only get worse as we factor in future renewable subsidies and the £100 billion grid upgrade needed for decarbonisation.
To give an indication of the wishful thinking by net-zero advocates, in 2014 the current Secretary of State for Energy promised 1 million new green jobs. The outcome is somewhat less impressive. Since then, official government data shows an increase in employment in the low-carbon sector of just 40,000. Against this must be offset the manufacturing jobs we have already lost in other sectors. Moreover, there will surely be many more to come, not least in the steel and oil and gas sectors. We now have the worst of all worlds: high taxes to pay for job losses.
The other great beneficiary of all this wishful thinking is China. It is now the world leader in two seemingly contradictory energy policies: green energy, by securing the global supply and demand lines for lithium-ion batteries, solar panels and wind farm components; and brown energy, by building the equivalent of two coal-powered power stations a week. However, the Chinese famously take much a longer-term view of events than we do. They would agree that, due to recent advances in paleoclimate science, we know that over the last 400 million years the earth’s climate has been changing constantly and often dramatically. Relatively speaking, we are now in one of its cooler periods—the late Cenozoic ice age—meaning that we are at the tail-end of a 50-million-year cooling period.
On our own continent, even very recently we can see climate change in action. In Roman times, it was far warmer than it is now, followed by a brutal cold period in the Dark Ages. Then came the medieval warm period, when vines were growing even in Scotland. That was followed most recently by an especially cold period called the “little ice age”, the coldest period in the last 10,000 years. The statement we heard today that 2023 was the hottest year on record is quite simply not true—far from it.
This long-term view of the earth’s climate changes puts the whole net-zero delusion into a much greater perspective. It suggests that we are taxing and bankrupting ourselves domestically for absolutely minimal global benefit, if any. This whole worldview of climate change should be the subject of another debate, and a very fruitful one it would be too.
Conversion Therapy Prohibition (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) Bill [HL]
Lord Strathcarron Excerpts(10 months, 1 week ago)
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Lord Strathcarron (Con)
My Lords, there are many areas of concern with the Bill, as we have heard, but I would like to focus on what it means to parents and children, and to freedom of speech and religion.
As the Bill is drafted, and before the army of amendments surely coming its way, it would become a criminal offence for parents to discuss gender issues with their children. Given that parents will have only their child’s best interests at heart, there is clearly no harmful intent, yet, as drafted, the Bill assumes there is only harmful intent. Surely it cannot be right, as a matter of principle, that free speech becomes criminalised when there is no harm intended, let alone caused.
How are these private family conversations discovered anyway? It is possibly because a child tells a classmate or teacher. What then of the teacher? Is he or she committing a crime by not reporting the parents to the police? If she or he does report the parents to the police and the police arrest the parents—who now have a criminal record—what does that do to future family relationships?
But it gets worse. The Bill proposes to ban not only spoken free speech but silent free speech in the form of prayers. Thus, we have a new crime: prayer crime. Ban Conversion Therapy’s founders say that a ban must cover “gentle, non-coercive prayer”, before going on to confirm that prayer has a “pernicious power”, and then linking prayer and corrective rape. Humanists UK says that the ban must cover repentances, wilfully ignoring that repentance is a core belief of the Christian faith. As it is drafted, will our own right reverend Prelates also face prosecution, if, for example, at Sunday school they were to read from any of St Paul’s Epistles to the Romans, Galatians or Corinthians or from the Hebrews or the Epistle of James? Would imams, rabbis and gurus also not be liable for reading from their scriptures? If they were not reading in English, which seems highly likely, how convoluted will that prosecution be? What effect will that have on community and cultural relations? None of this has been thought through at all.
As with parents and prayers, so with clinicians. As the interim Cass review concluded, clinicians should delve deeply into a child’s emotional state, but the Bill would make such exploratory conversations illegal and leave the clinician open to prosecution. As with parents, the clinician would have no statutory defence—an extraordinary state of affairs in itself—which will almost certainly lead to miscarriages of justices.
Talking of justice, noble Lords far more learned than me are certain that, as drafted, the Bill would fall foul of ECHR Articles 8, 9, 10 and 11. I agree with the previous suggestion in this House by the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, that Parliament should not pass Bills that are unlikely to survive a human rights challenge.
The Bill places parents in an impossible situation. To discuss with their child their gender identity and explore the future options will now be illegal. What remains legal—the Tavistock/Mermaids solution of brain-damaging cross-sex hormones, pubescent breast binders, teenage double mastectomies, physical and chemical castrations, testosterone injections that so ravage the young female body, puberty blockers that lower IQ, breast enhancers and pumping up with steroids and artificial hormones—is all too awful for any loving parent to consider. Faced with the choice between illegal, non-violent, open discussion with their children, and legal but violent and irreversible so-called treatments, I suspect that most parents will now be forced to choose the illegal option.
The irony is that conversion therapy used to mean the type of physical violence that has now been criminalised by other legislation. Yet the proponents of the Bill have no hesitation in inflicting a different type of physical violence on the children of those who oppose them. The Bill fails on many levels, and I fear that no number of amendments will make it workable, but of course we must try.