European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Viscount Ridley and Lord Deben

Wednesday 7th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

Will my noble friend explain something to me? He has just said “passed into our law”, but there is confusion, particularly in relation to what the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, said, about environmental law. This is surely about environmental principles, which are really quite different. They are, on the whole, aspirations, with which many of us may agree, but they are not part of the legislation as such.

[Lord Deben]

I fear that my noble friend is not right on that, for two reasons. First, all environmental law in the European Union has been intimately connected with the principles upon which it is based. Indeed, you cannot understand the law unless you understand the principles. That has always been the situation. All we are saying is: let us make our law understandable by the principles to which we have assented and to which, we are told, the present Government wish to continue to assent. The distinction between principles and law is not correct in this case. Secondly, even if he were right—and I am not sure that he and I would always agree on the same aspirations as far as the law is concerned—it is very peculiar for the Government, having said that this is what they want, not to be prepared to put it into the law, because these are the very words to which the Prime Minister and other Ministers have referred. This is a distinction without a difference in this case.

Since my noble friend has raised it, I say that when we voted on these laws—some of which I did as a Minister—we did so on the whole package, which was the principles as adumbrated in the law itself. It is not possible to take the legal bits out without the principles, as he would suggest, because it is the principles that enable one to interpret what the law says. That has always been accepted. The Government, in their statements, certainly gave every impression that that was what they wanted to do. I very much hope that whatever my noble friend says about additionality—

Feed-in Tariffs (Amendment) (No. 3) Order 2015

Debate between Viscount Ridley and Lord Deben

Tuesday 2nd February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, I was not here at the start of the debate, but I hope the House will indulge me if I add a few short remarks. The noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, said that the policy of feed-in tariffs has been highly successful. What do we mean by that? It has been highly successful in taking money off people and giving it to other people. As my noble friend Lord Cavendish said, something in the order of £1 billion a year is now going through this programme. It is going, on the whole, from the poor to the rich because electricity bills are a bigger part of poor people’s bills than they are of rich people’s bills, and most of the people who can afford to put up the upfront costs of drawing down feed-in tariffs are on the whole rich people.

That is not the measure of success surely by which we should judge this policy. The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, just said that it should be judged by its impact on the climate. So how much has it reduced carbon dioxide emissions? How much bang for that enormous billion pound buck are we getting? The answer is: a trivial effect. We know that solar power, which is the bulk of the feed-in tariffs, produced 1% of our electricity last year. Therefore, the emissions reduction cannot be more than 1%. It is probably a lot less because of back-up and other issues. We know roughly where it is and we can therefore make a rough calculation as to the costs per tonne of carbon we are buying these omissions at.

The figure for those who were lucky enough to get Ed Miliband’s first tranche of feed-in tariffs is close to £1,000 a tonne. Not even the noble Lord, Lord Stern, thinks the social cost of carbon is anything like that. He says that it is about $29 per tonne. More recent estimates, because of cuts in the feed-in tariff, show that that number has now come down to something like £200 a tonne, but it is still 10 times higher than the social cost of carbon. We do not have a successful policy. We are doing it on the backs of relatively poor people. It surprises me that the two parties opposite should in this case be taking the side of the Sheriff of Nottingham rather than Robin Hood.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, as chairman of the climate change committee, I declare an interest. I also declare a clear view that my job is to be entirely independent on these issues. Therefore, it is with care that I am going to try to navigate the discussion that we have had so far.

The climate change committee has clearly stated that we have a requirement, if we are to meet our statutory ends, to meet first of all the fourth carbon budget and then the fifth carbon budget which has been presented to the Government. The Government have committed themselves to the fourth carbon budget, and they must legislate on the fifth before the end of June. That is in the Act. No doubt, Ministers will be thinking very carefully about how they will do that because there is no elbow room in the fifth carbon budget. It is as generous as it is possible to be while still meeting the targets that were laid down—reducing our emissions by 80% by 2050—not by the climate change committee but by the Act itself.

In dealing with the Government’s proposals here today, it is not for the climate change committee to argue that the Government should not do this, should do that, or should do the other. It is for the committee to remind the Minister that the Government are committed to delivering reductions in emissions. The mechanism used must indeed be for the Government—that is the democratic balance we have established in the Climate Change Act.

Climate Change

Debate between Viscount Ridley and Lord Deben

Wednesday 17th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords—

Energy Bill

Debate between Viscount Ridley and Lord Deben

Tuesday 2nd July 2013 Grand Committee

[Viscount Ridley]

My Lords, in the United States, shale gas has displaced coal. I should, by the way, declare my interest in coal even though, once again, I am speaking against it and in favour of its greatest competitor, gas. There has been a massive displacement of coal by shale gas, which brings me on to the next point. The effect of displacing coal with shale gas in the United States has been to cause the fastest drop in CO₂ emissions of any western country. They are down to the levels they were at 30 years ago and down to the per capita levels they were at 50 years ago. These are extraordinary achievements and suggest that we have, in shale gas, a technology for short-term reduction in carbon dioxide emissions—not all the way down to 50 grams or anything like that but a good chunk of the way—that could be achieved and combined with affordability. The counterfactual to building a huge amount of offshore wind capacity and other industries is to allow the development of gas in this country. We know that the numbers would be much lower in terms of the cost to the consumer—it would be much more feasible and much more affordable. To throw away the flexibility of going for that possibility would be a potential mistake.

[Lord Deben]

I am sure that the noble Viscount knows this, but in the calculations that the climate change committee has made, it fully accepts the need for using that shale gas in the amounts that we generously expect will be used. We are not throwing it away, we are including it as one of the portfolio.

[Viscount Ridley]

Would the noble Lord accept that the figure that came out last week for the amount of shale gas under the UK is far higher than was assumed when his report was written? I went to talk to Cuadrilla at one point last year. I said that the 200 trillion cubic feet that they were talking about under Lancashire was being ridiculed as a very high number and asked whether they stood by it. They said, “Privately, we think it is much higher. It is about 300 trillion cubic feet but we dare not say so because people will not take that seriously”. Then an independent consultant, Nick Grealy, said 700 trillion cubic feet and everybody laughed at it. Now, the British Geological Survey has said there is 1,300 trillion cubic feet. This is the largest find of shale gas ever on the planet. The shale rock we are talking about, the Bowland shale, is in places 10 times as thick as the Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania.

I went to see shale gas extraction in the Marcellus shale in 2011 because I had heard about it and thought it was interesting. You could hardly find these well pads—they are tiny and hidden among the trees. There was a flock of wild turkeys running across the road on the way to one. I asked somebody for a calculation of just how much energy can come out of a small area when you are drilling for shale gas. The answer is that about 25 acres of well pad in Pennsylvania can produce as much energy from shale gas as the entire UK wind industry produces at the moment.