Climate Change

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Monday 24th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, on his incisive opening to this debate, and for getting it in the first place. It is fantastic to have the noble Earl, Lord Russell, here, as yet another person who cares about planet and people—it is absolutely amazing.

One of the problems with coming further down the speakers’ lists in these debates is that I get distracted by all the people who come before me. For example, the noble Lord, Lord Hastings, mentioned Glastonbury —I was there, so I can talk to him more about the waste and the rubbish. The noble Lord, Lord Frost, made all the denialist tropes. If he would like more debate, I can recommend some leading climate scientists who can explain the situation to him, instead of him reading right-wing conspiracy theories, as those are quite damaging.

I am not going to ask the Minister any questions because I do not think he will answer them to my satisfaction, even marginally. The Government are so awful on the issue of climate change, on both mitigation and adaptation; they are absolutely incompetent. I can see that the Minister is not hanging his head in shame, but he really ought to.

As we have heard from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, things are going to get tough. It is saying that, as we go towards 2 degrees of warming, there will be impacts on things such as food. With a rise of up to 2 degrees, people and Governments can adapt to a great extent by changing what we grow, where we grow it and when we harvest it. However, those are no longer once-in-a-generation changes; they are changes that will happen at least every decade, and possibly every few years, as the climate shifts further away from what we have known. 

The IPCC also found that, once we go beyond 2 degrees, the damage to world food production will be absolutely devastating, no matter how much we try to adapt. That will of course mean the migration of millions of people, as they try to find food and homes. Millions of people will die—I hate to be depressing about this but I cannot see any way round it. The human world will become smaller, as ecosystems that support life simply collapse. We have to take responsibility for our failure to mitigate the impacts of climate change. We are very slow to adapt. Beyond 2 degrees, we get into an era where millions of species will die—plants, creatures and fungi. We will die with them—the bees go and they take us with them.

One vast area that the Government are not doing enough about is the ocean. As the oceans warm, all sorts of things are changing. We can see that they are changing already, but we do not know how far they will go. Adaptation is all very well if you know what is going to happen, but with the ocean we do not have the scientific data to tell us. Changes in ecosystems barely register with us as crucial when they could be really worrying.

In the meantime, Oceana, an organisation that campaigns to achieve measurable outcomes that will protect and restore our ocean, says we must end new offshore oil and gas drilling and accelerate a just transition to renewable energy; ban bottom trawling in offshore marine protected areas and within three nautical miles of the coast; and end overfishing by committing to catch quotas in line with scientific advice. That all sounds like really good advice for the Government to take.

Finally, if the Government do only one thing, they really have to just stop oil.