Climate Agenda

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, for securing this debate, even if perhaps it has turned out somewhat differently from what he expected. It has been a rich and encouraging debate, but I am not sure that the noble Lord, Lord Frost, has been watching the same debate as the rest of us. We have seen not a crumbling but rather a strengthening of the wall of understanding and common sense, particularly among the majority opposition party on this side of the House.

I join others in welcoming the noble Baroness, Lady May of Maidenhead, to your Lordships’ House, and to publicly offer thanks for her notably restrained resignation list, as the noble Lord, Lord Young, noted, offering the Green Party the seat that came to bring me into your Lordships’ House. I hope that she might encourage further moves in that direction from her new position in your Lordships’ House.

The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, in introducing this, said that he wanted an honest and informed debate. I start by picking up a couple of the terms that he used, including “cheap energy”. Fossil fuel energy, as a number of noble Lords have outlined and as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, identified, has very considerable externalised costs. In fact, burning fossil fuels is costing us the earth. As the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, highlighted, looking at the risk of the ending of AMOC—the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, often referred to as part of the Gulf Stream—giving Britain the climate of Scandinavia would be a considerable cost and could not be called a result of cheap energy.

I pick up the point from the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, on the drop in territorial emissions in the UK. As the Climate Change Committee has highlighted, we should be counting our consumption emissions. When we look at those figures, those emissions are only 19% lower in 2021 than in 2001. They are the goods and services that we are using, and we are responsible for the emissions associated with them.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, I think that the criteria that the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, has used to judge climate change action are interesting: jobs, growth and prosperity. I shall focus briefly on each of those. On growth, I am going to differ from most of the speakers thus far. We cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. We are, whether we like it or not, in a post-growth world, and it is not just me saying that—I point to the fact that the IMF has just been saying in the past week that we cannot have expectations of growth in future like the ones that we have had in the past. The pie of our economy cannot get bigger. What we have to do is to stop forcing some people to rely on crumbs and slice that pie up fairly. Who is benefiting from growth in an economy where, in the UK now, we have 4.3 million children growing up in poverty?

The second point is jobs. Everyone is saying that we need to create jobs. I remind the House that in one debate this week we were looking at the new funded childcare places. We need 36,000 more workers to provide those childcare places. We are short of 50,000 nurses and 100,000 care workers—and look at the immigration shortage list, which has chemical and biological scientists, bricklayers, stonemasons, tilers and retrofitters. These are the activities of the economy that we desperately need. What we need to do is to stop having jobs that trash our climate and environment and ensure that, in a just transition, those skills, and the energy, time and talents of those workers, go towards doing what we actually need to be done. That is a just transition.

Finally, I focus on prosperity. One dictionary definition gives it as

“the condition of being successful or thriving”.

We are a society in poor and declining health, and what the noble Lord identified as “cheap energy” is a significant contributor to that ill health. There is air pollution, for example. We can look at recent mapping from the EXPANSE project at the University of Utrecht. There are only a few areas in the north of Scotland that have pollution levels at or below World Health Organization-recommended levels. Those levels of air pollution are contributing to heart and lung disease, COPD, lung cancer, dementia, lower birthrate babies and asthma. We are not a prosperous society, we are an ill society, and the burning of fossil fuels is a significant contributor to that. Climate action is also action to improve health in our society.

The noble Lord, Lord Frost, questioned the insulating of homes. Having a warm, comfortable and affordable-to-heat home—a healthy home—is surely a foundation of life that our economy should provide to every single person. Let us not forget that the cleanest, greenest and cheapest energy that you can possibly have is the energy that you do not need to use.

I briefly mention childhood obesity, poor diet and our broken food system, based on fossil fuels. Our five year-olds now are shorter than they were a few years ago. The economy is not working for our people and it is not working in its own terms, so we cannot afford not to have a climate agenda—one that needs to be far bolder and more effective than what we have now. We should be looking for zero carbon by the early 2030s, because of the climate emergency, the nature crisis and the planetary boundaries that we are exceeding—but also for health and well-being and the prosperity of our nation. We need to ensure that we have well-paid and secure jobs in every role that actually needs doing. We need a climate agenda and a just transition for a society living within the physical limits of this planet.

There has been, and will be, a lot of talk about technological innovation. Of course we need that, but we also need social innovation—such as a four-day working week as standard, with no loss of pay; universal basic income; and free education. These are the social innovations that we need for climate action and for a prosperous society.