Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading Scheme Order 2020

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 27th October 2020 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, I apologise for the technical hitch, but I was unable to see or hear the Committee. I was going to say that it was a pleasure to follow the focus of the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, on the terrible standard of UK housing stock and the need to decarbonise home heating. This is the Cinderella of energy policy and it needs to be put centre stage. But it is also a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering. It is no surprise to be following her, given her intense involvement in environmental issues.

It is always my intention to be positive when I can, so I welcome the fact that there has been consultation with and agreement from the nations of the UK on this order. We would like to see this happening in many other areas of governance. I also welcome the fact that there is a promised and apparently firm timetable for appropriately aligning to a net-zero trajectory by January 2023 and no later than January 2024. However, I would of course like to see faster action.

The net zero by 2050 target is grossly inadequate when we look at the science and the facts on the ground —from the failure of the Arctic sea ice to begin reformation this year to the fact that in Colorado they are hoping for snow to end an unprecedentedly long wildfire season. The Green Party is calling for a 2030 net-zero target.

One thing that Covid-19 has shown us is that the way in which our society operates can change quickly under emergency conditions, and we are in a climate emergency now. The whole Arctic Ocean is heading for ice-free conditions in the future, possibly very soon, if defined as less than 1 million square kilometres of ice cover. That is down from 8 million square kilometres just 40 years ago. We have just come out of the warmest global September on record and it is now more likely than not that 2020 will be the warmest year for the earth’s surface since reliable records began—and without a major El Niño event, which has contributed to most of the prior record warmest years. The noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, painted a picture of successful policy. That does not look like a successful picture.

With the Covid-19 lockdowns, there was a significant drop in emissions in the first half of the year globally, but I want to quote Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the founding director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. He said:

“While the CO₂ drop is unprecedented, decreases of human activities cannot be the answer … Instead we need structural and transformational changes in our energy production and consumption systems. Individual behavior is certainly important, but what we really need to focus on is reducing the carbon intensity of our global economy.”


In simpler terms that is system change, not climate change, which is what this statutory instrument has to be part of delivering. As the Green Party has always said, individual action cannot make a difference on the scale needed; we need to make a massive adjustment to and transform our economy and society, so that we no longer see the few profit from pumping carbon into the air while the rest of us pay with the planet in flames.

I am disappointed that the Minister’s introduction had such a focus on economic growth. To quote a long-term green saying, you cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. Economic growth has given us an unhealthy, poverty-stricken and unstable society. We need a different target in policies and systems to deliver the energy and goods that people need within the physical limits of this one fragile, damaged planet.

I will make no apologies for continuing to remind your Lordships that the UK has a unique responsibility as the chair of COP 26. If we think about what history will remember from this period, the result of that meeting will feature far higher, for good or ill, than any other events of our time—no matter how hard-pressed we are at this moment by the Covid-19 pandemic interacting with the pressing poverty and inequality in our society, as highlighted in an important report today by another Member of your Lordships’ House, the noble Baroness, Lady Lawrence. I suggest to the Committee that we ask ourselves whether the SI today and all the Government’s policies go far enough. Will they be part of the solution or of the problem?

The position of the UK’s Green Alliance on the UK’s emissions trading replacement for the EU-ETS scheme is that

“the general principle that should apply is that any new regime has to be ‘as strong or stronger’ than current arrangements.”

That would seem to be the promise of government policy although, as so often with what we debate in your Lordships’ House, there is a risk of a devil in the detail. An SI scheduled for next month refers to the arrangements to make free allowances for businesses most at risk of transferring production to other countries with less stringent emissions constraints.

It is of course impossible to talk about the EU ETS without reflecting on how it failed to deliver the needed changes. When the history of the past decade of carbon policy is written, that is likely to figure as one of the great failures. We need to look at this SI in that context.

We come back to the UK’s role as the chair of COP 26. We have the dreadful suffering of the pandemic and the chaos at the end of the Brexit transition period. But we have yet to hear, as the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, said, about the talks on the integration of how the EU ETS and Britain’s scheme will interact. What progress is being made? That is one of the many areas on which I look forward to hearing responses from the Minister to my questions, and those of other people.