Climate Change Committee Progress Report 2021

Debate between Anthony Browne and Sheryll Murray

Thursday 21st October 2021 Westminster Hall

[Anthony Browne]

I thank everyone for what has been an excellent debate, as various other Members have commented. We clearly have a shared ambition and this afternoon’s discussion has been 90% policy and only about 10% politics. It has been incredibly civilised—although I am rather worried that the hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead) praising me so much has completely ruined my political career before it has even begun.

I will not go through all the different points because the Minister did it so effectively and he is in charge of the policy, but I want to highlight a few things that people have said. The hon. Member for Southampton, Test rightly pointed out that power had gone down very quickly and had gone down less in other sectors. There is some rationale behind that. I wrote about electric vehicles and I test-drove them about 20 years ago. The common complaint then was that they were transferring pollution from city centres up to the valleys where the power stations were, because electricity was largely produced by coal then.

It is not any greener to drive an electric car if the electricity that powers it comes from coal. Electric vehicles and other aspects of the transportation system, such as electric trains, as well as the heat pumps that we have been talking about, can be far greener if the electricity they use is decarbonised. I do not know whether that is deliberate on the part of the Government, but decarbonising electricity first and then going to the other sectors that are more difficult to decarbonise does make a sort of sense from a climate point of view.

A couple of comments were made about airport expansion, such as by the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy), and someone mentioned road expansion. The Minister said that any expansion of airports would only be compliant with our commitments to net zero, and that is absolutely right. I get very involved in road conversations in my constituency because it is a big issue locally. When cars reach net zero—when we all have fully electric cars and the production of cars is carbon-neutral as well, which if we decarbonise industry will happen—having more cars driving around will not have any impact on climate change. I realise that that is some way off and that congestion would then be more of an issue, so the different rationales for adjusting cars, airports or whatever will be different. I think net zero aviation is a very long way away.

One thing that I did not touch on, but which the Minister and others did, is the economic opportunity. I have been an economics correspondent, I am on the Treasury Committee, and I used to run the British Bankers Association. I focus very closely on economic issues and I have become more convinced that all the talk about green jobs is not just greenwashing but is actually genuine. There really are economic opportunities for us, particularly if we become a world leader in sectors ahead of other countries. We have been a bit behind on heat pumps so far, but if we make the progress that I hope we will make, it will create an industry that we can start exporting to other countries a lot more. We talked about that when we debated carbon capture, utilisation and storage yesterday. There is a huge economic opportunity in terms of exports.

We have had various discussions on nuclear. There was a bit of disagreement—some of us like nuclear, but some of us do not. I want to share a little observation. I went to Chernobyl village once—again, it was about 20 years ago. I went with the United Nations, which had done an investigation of the long-term health consequences of Chernobyl and concluded that they were absolutely minimal. From memory, I think about 40 people died of acute radiation sickness at the time of the explosion in Chernobyl, but most of the other health consequences were because of other factors. About 30,000 people were moved out of Pripyat, which is the town near Chernobyl. They were moved to other parts of Ukraine, without jobs and communities. A lot of them became alcoholic and depressed, and they died of alcoholism rather than the impacts of Chernobyl.

There have been a lot of scary stories about nuclear, but it is one of the safest forms of power. I will quote some figures—these are measured by deaths per terawatt hours, which is a huge amount of energy produced. Taking into account all factors, such as air pollution, deaths in production and so on, coal is 24.6 deaths per terawatt hour, oil is 18.4, biomass is 4.6, gas is 2.8 and nuclear is 0.07, and that includes all the deaths in Fukushima and Chernobyl.

[Mrs Sheryll Murray (in the Chair)]

Order. I remind the hon. Gentleman that we are summing up now.

[Anthony Browne]

I will wind up by saying that nuclear is very safe and we do not need to worry about it. It has been an excellent debate.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the UK’s Climate Progress: the Committee on Climate Change’s 2021 Progress Report.