Infrastructure Bill [Lords]

Debate between Anne Main and Julian Huppert

Monday 26th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Dr Huppert]

I will try to be brief, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley), and I pay tribute to her for her work on this issue and her call for the moratorium, with which I agree. We have the problem of using too many fossil fuels; despite knowing the harm that climate change is causing and is going to continue to cause, we still see a thirst to have more and more of them. The solution has to look different. Perhaps in the future it will be nuclear fusion—who knows? We are 25 years away from that, as we have been for about 50 years. We have to reach a situation where we have renewables and other low-carbon energy sources, and energy efficiency, so that we use less energy, be it for heating, transport or anything else.

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

rose—

[Dr Huppert]

I will give way only the once.

[Mrs Main]

Does the hon. Gentleman share my concern that there is no obligation to make sure that renewables are considered as part of large major infrastructure projects?

[Dr Huppert]

Indeed; we should be seeing a quest for more renewables. One of my concerns about the dash for fracking and for gas is that it can be seen as a substitute for a dash for renewables and other low-carbon technologies, which is where we have to get to. That is what worries me about all this. When we know from study after study of the huge amounts of fossil fuels that we have to leave in the earth because we simply cannot afford the harm that would come from burning them, why go to a mass effort to legislate to say that we have to take as much as possible out of the ground? That is not the right way to go. Carbon emissions, be they carbon dioxide or methane, are the biggest problems with shale gas and fracking.

It is very interesting to look at the scientific evidence on the comparison with liquefied natural gas. A comment was made about my constituent Dave MacKay and the range of carbon emissions. What he found was that the range of carbon emissions from shale gas overlaps with that from liquefied natural gas. There is no guarantee that we will see a reduction as a result.