Carbon Budgets
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts(4 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to adjust carbon budgets in the light of past performance and the Paris Agreement.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Lord Henley) (Con)
My Lords, our existing carbon budgets are already among the most ambitious in the world. They continue to set the right level of challenge for the years ahead. Our priority is to deliver against these stretching targets through our clean growth strategy.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
One of the ways that we as a nation are cheating on our carbon budget at the moment is by importing some of the most polluting goods from abroad, which means that the countries producing them carry the carbon emission burden. Will the Government now commit to capturing those offshore emissions so that we can understand fully how polluting we are as a nation?
Lord Henley
My Lords, I do not accept the noble Baroness’s premise that we are cheating; we are following international rules on this matter. If we wanted to change in the manner that she suggests, which might be a way ahead, it would be worth doing only if we had international agreement from all sides.
Environment and Climate Emergency
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts(4 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Henley
My Lords, in the time I have available to respond to a Question of this sort, I cannot go into detail on every single bit of research that we are doing into energy storage, carbon capture, use and storage, and a whole range of other things. I am more than happy to write to the noble Lord with greater detail on this—he seems to be signalling to me to do that—but I can say that we are committed to doing all we can to meet the targets. We believe that with existing technology we can meet them, and with advances in technology we can do even better.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, I am absolutely delighted that the Government think they can meet that target but so far, I have not seen the sort of action that is needed. We need a massively rethought-out new green deal so that that we can discuss it in this Chamber and suggest ways forward for government.
Lord Henley
My Lords, we passed the legislation last week. We have announced an environment Bill, the Agriculture Bill is coming along, we have announced an energy White Paper and there is the industrial strategy, which has energy-specific parts. A whole range of government action is going on and there will be more to come.
Climate Change Act 2008 (2050 Target Amendment) Order 2019
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts(4 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
I point out to those Members who wish to argue about this that it is freezing in here and I do not have a cardigan. Could we speed up a little?
Lord Fox (LD)
My Lords, I will take that as my cue. I fear that I am intruding on a domestic, and of course we do not like to comment on domestic disputes. I assure the noble Baroness that I will attempt and indeed succeed to be somewhat more economical in time.
We welcome this debate and the tabling of the amendment. We understand the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, and, in a different way, the point the noble Lord, Lord Deben, made in his very powerful speech—that we ought to understand more about how the means of this delivery will be willed. In the end, that is the key to achieving this objective.
This SI is the equivalent of sitting around a kitchen table, unfolding a map, pointing at it and saying, “That’s where we want to go”. It does not in any way get us any further down the road unless we understand how we are going to get there. I will try to maintain a practical end to this speech.
Call it self-indulgent or self-referential behaviour to point this out, but in September 2017 the Lib Dems approved a policy called “A Vision for Britain: Clean, Green and Carbon Free”, one of those great slogans we come up with. Its mission was to push the Government further and to push them to ask the question of the CCC about zero carbon in 2050. It was a milestone, and the reason I mention it is that it was an achievement for my colleague who cannot be here today, the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone. I wanted to acknowledge her role in some of this.
New Liberal Democrat policies will continue to press the Government harder and will be further refined. They will also seek to outline some of the challenges and issues that need to be addressed to meet this incredibly exacting target. It is not just about stopping doing things; we will have to take carbon, CO2 and greenhouse gases out of the system to achieve this. Although I respect the point the noble Lord made about using existing technologies, I challenge that it is the outer edge of existing technologies that will enable us to do some of those things. There is a lot of work for the Government to enable us to be in that position.
That is why we need the Government to explain how we are going to go forward. We should be approaching this problem multilaterally. We are talking about the United Kingdom, but we sit in the continent of Europe. It would be much more sensible if we were doing this as a bloc and a group in the European Union. Noble Lords would expect me to say that.
We need to be very clear on what we are trying to do and we need to be very honest about how we measure what we have achieved. That means basing it on our real footprint. There cannot be fudging of figures. We cannot disregard our imports, where we are simply exporting our footprint, and we need to be very careful about things such as offsets. The CCC sets out some big technologies, but I will pick on a few in no particular order, and not an exhaustive number. I will talk about low-carbon power, energy efficiency, electric vehicles, domestic heating, and air travel and shipping.
We of course need to accelerate the development of renewable and low-carbon power. As Liberal Democrats, we will be setting forward a much more ambitious target than we have even achieved now. It should be said, in the spirit of self-congratulation, that the level we have now was very much laid down through the work the coalition Government did, notwithstanding some dismantling around offshore wind, which occurred in the succeeding Government. The fact we have been able to have coal-free generation over the past few weeks is very much a credit to them. But creating the right investment environment for zero-carbon or low-carbon generation is a real challenge—I do not have to tell the Minister that—and we need to understand how the Government will work with industry to deliver the right investment vehicle with some idea of a framework. From a personal point of view, as I have said before, I think that included in that should be effective energy storage, because without that we will not have a flexible, low-carbon grid.
Everybody talks about energy efficiency; we have already heard about it twice. We have to introduce a major programme. We already have much of the legislation we need; we need to enforce the regulations.
On the subject of building, and not just conventional techniques, there is a revolution out there. I sat on the Science and Technology Select Committee. Off-site building can deliver much higher-specification buildings. The Government need to lead on that process with the buildings they commission.
Electric vehicles are interesting, because they are an important personal commitment for people. They are a big acquisition that people make in their commitment to the environment. Actually, it is quite hard. The waiting lists are long. One of the problems, as has already been mentioned, is battery technology. We have the Faraday challenge, but we are importing many of the batteries we need for current electric vehicles. We need a much stronger supply. Can the Minister tell us where we are on the Faraday Challenge gigaplant? When will the spades be wielded, because it will take years before it is working? How is the Road to Zero going? Where are we on it and will we firm up the targets? Things such as on-street charging remain behind the game. There needs to be consumer certainty around the plug-in car grant. Can the Government give a long-term view on that, rather than just to the end of the year?
Decarbonising heating is a very important point that has already been mentioned. There are options, such as hydrogen and heat exchange. How are the Government going to frame this? The last time we had a big domestic switchover, it was between coal gas and natural gas, and a single national monopoly delivered it. What is the means by which this process will be delivered? Will it be locally, through LEPs, by private enterprise? We know how well—or not well—the smart meters process has gone, so what is the thinking within the Government to deliver this?
Lord Turner of Ecchinswell (CB)
My Lords, I declare an interest in a renewable energy company primarily involved in the wind business, though not in Europe. It is primarily involved with China, India and developing world; contrary to the implication of earlier comments by the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, there is quite a lot of action occurring in those countries as well as in our own.
I very much hope that we will support this order with enthusiasm and strong cross-party support, continuing that pattern of cross-party consensus about which the noble Lord, Lord Deben, spoke earlier. There has been a consensus; it has been opposed by a minority of sceptics, but the facts have continually proved those sceptics wrong. We have to take action because it is clear that global warming is occurring, and it is now occurring at an accelerating pace.
In 1998 we faced, because of an El Niño effect, a year in which temperatures soared well above the trend of rising temperature that scientists had predicted. As a result, there was for about eight years thereafter something of a pause in the average rise of temperatures. At that time, many sceptics—including, I suspect, some contributing to this debate today—leaped on that pause and said, “Well, that proves that global warming is not occurring”. However, the fact is that nine of the hottest years on record have occurred since 2005 and the five hottest have been the last five. On the current pattern of this year, it is looking almost certain that by its end we will be saying that the six hottest have been those up to 2019. We are facing very clear evidence that warming is occurring.
We also have to take action because there will be extremely harmful effects. What is going on in India has already been referred to; I have just come back from there, where I was engaging with many people in the Indian steel and cement industries who are putting in place plans for radical reductions in their carbon emissions. While I was there, the temperatures in northern India were over 50 degrees centigrade. With only a few degrees warming, the North Indian Plain will be essentially unliveable for human beings. We face major challenges from climate change, but there are other parts of the world where it is truly life-threatening.
We cannot now stop significant global warming—it is baked in already—but we have to limit it as much as possible. The guideline of how much we should limit it by is well described by the IPCC report from November of last year, which argued effectively that beyond about 1.5 degrees centigrade of warming, the effects are non-linear—they are multiplying. Every 0.5 degrees centigrade further does not just make it a bit worse but a lot worse, so that is a reasonable target. To achieve that, the whole world has to get to about net zero emissions sometime around 2050 or 2060. Some developing countries growing rapidly will find it difficult to get there by 2050 but can get there by 2060. That makes it a reasonable target for us, with our greater economic capacity, to get there by 2050.
The costs of our getting there by 2050 are clearly manageable. When estimates are produced of the costs of achieving emissions reductions, sceptics always come out with arguments that say, “These estimates are far too low”. However, experience suggests precisely the opposite. In 2003, the Government estimated that the cost of reducing emissions in the UK by 60% would be about 1% to 2% of GDP. In 2008, when I was the first chair of the climate change committee, we estimated—on the basis of a very detailed, sector-by-sector analysis of what the resource costs would be in power production in the transport sector, and so on—that to achieve an 80% reduction it would be 1% to 1.5% of GDP. The CCC, on the basis of equally detailed analysis, has now suggested that 100% would cost 1% to 1.5% of GDP.
Why have those costs come down, or at least why has what you can achieve for the same costs gone up? The answer is that the costs of key technologies have come down far faster than any of us dared believe would happen. The cost of solar photovoltaics has come down by about 85% in the last 10 years, the cost of wind power by about 75% in the last 10 years, and the cost of batteries by about 85%. That shows the extraordinary power of scale economies, learning-curve effects and induced technological change—once you have clear, quantitative targets, you drive cost reductions that would not otherwise occur.
It is almost certain that such technological change, learning-curve effects and economy-of-scale effects will occur in future and will probably prove the climate change committee to have been too conservative again. But it has been right to be conservative and say, “These are the maximum costs that we might face and which will occur if we do not have radical cost reduction, but it is highly likely that we will”. The most effective way to ensure that we get technological change and cost reductions from learning-curve and economy-of-scale effects is to set a stretching target so that industry knows that that is non-negotiable and that within that, it can invest to achieve those cost reductions, confident that that will be economic. That provides us with a strong basis for supporting this order—with, I hope, unanimity, and certainly with strong support.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb
My Lords, in preparation for the debate this afternoon I looked up the Government’s climate change policy page and I got an error message: “Page not found”. That was at midday today—I do not know if it is up and running now—but it says something about the Government’s ability on the issue of climate change.
I wanted to disagree with the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, but I felt it was not fair to keep interrupting him. He says that there will be “no significant impact on business” but of course this will have a significant impact on business. Climate change will be dreadful; we have to make sure that business understands that and that it moves on.
I am told that the reason the Chamber is so cold is because a valve is stuck open. That shows that we cannot always rely on technology, because even the simplest technology can go wrong. My teeth are chattering now, so I shall hurry through my comments.
I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Deben, on his speech. I particularly liked his being prepared to point out that 2030 was perhaps a better target than 2050. I would go further and say 2025. We cannot afford that length of time.
I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Fox, who talked about what could be better and what the Government need to do. I have just challenges for the Government, because over the past weeks, months and years, and again today, I have listened to the Government telling us how great they are on climate change, how they are acting and how much they are spending. Quite honestly, it is a load of tosh, because they are not doing enough.
Viscount Ridley
The noble Baroness will be aware, because she will have read Charles Moore’s excellent biography of Margaret Thatcher, that she later resiled from those views—on climate change specifically, not on other environmental issues—and said that, yes, the problem was exaggerated.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb
Yes, I am well aware that all politicians can get it wrong at various times, and she was wrong there.
What has happened to the Conservative Party in the meantime? We have a Government who resist onshore wind installations, which would supply cheap, clean energy, while supporting dirty, expensive fracking. Fracking is not the answer: it is a way to pump more fossil fuels into the atmosphere and, in the process, allow a rapacious private company, Cuadrilla, to stifle legitimate, peaceful protest. The Government push a steep VAT increase—from 5% to 20%—for new solar battery systems while coal remains at a discounted rate, and propose a third runway at Heathrow and more roadbuilding. We seem to be in a topsy-turvy world where the Government do not understand what is happening.
At the same time, three children—three climate protesters—from the Albany Academy, are being punished for attending the youth strike for climate protests. Children fighting for their future is not a crime. A brave planet protector, Angie Zelter, has been in court this week for protesting with Extinction Rebellion. She says:
“I cannot really understand why those in power have refused to act. After all, it is their world, too”.
It is noble Lords’ world, too. Many will have children and grandchildren who will be massively affected by this issue. I wish noble Lords over there would be a little quieter. Is that possible?
Fine words are not enough to fight erratic weather patterns that cause disasters in rich and poor countries. They are not enough to clean our rivers and seas of plastic pollution, to clean our polluted air, to save the curlew and the red squirrel up north, and certainly not enough to guarantee supplies of clean water, uncontaminated food and to resist global economic collapse. Can we please have some policies that will make a difference? As the protesters outside are saying, the time is now.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on introducing the order today, including what from our debate are proving challenging targets. I shall restrict my remarks to putting a specific question to my noble friend. Is it not the case that, in the short term, emissions will rise, particularly in the context of hydraulic fracturing for methane gas—an issue raised by other noble Lords? It is generally recognised that it is an inevitable result of fracking that methane will leak out of the natural gas wells at two stages: first, during the well being hydraulically fractured and the methane escaping; and, secondly, during the drill-out following the fracturing, when methane is released into the atmosphere. It is also generally understood that methane can be far more powerful than CO2 in its role in increasing greenhouse gas emissions, which leads to the inevitable warming of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Will my noble friend take the opportunity in summing up the debate on the statutory instrument this afternoon to explain how we are going to meet our targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and global warming by 2020 without inevitably increasing greenhouse gas emissions and global warming by continuing to pledge to fracture in the immediate future?
Climate Emergency
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts(4 years, 12 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Henley
My Lords, as to where the Agriculture Bill is, I fear that I cannot help the noble Baroness, but no doubt my noble friend sitting beside me will be able to offer advice in due course. All I can say is that we will do all we can in all fields—there are a great many fields in which work needs to be done—to reduce our carbon footprint. As I have said before, we have done a great deal, but there is a great deal more to do.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, the Government met the Extinction Rebellion campaign recently. What did they learn from that and what policies are going to change as a result of the meeting?
Lord Henley
My Lords, the most important thing is that we had the report a few months ago from the IPCC, which we put to our own climate change committee. Last week we received a report from the climate change committee and we will respond to it in due course.
Lord Henley
The noble Lord makes a good point. The first thing to say is that we should all eat up our greens.
Lord Henley
I will restrain my carnivorous habits in the future. However, the noble Lord makes a good point, and everyone should get that message—there is a great deal of waste in the food chain, just as there is throughout the world. We have possibly a lot less waste than in the third world as a result of the efficient means we have of moving food around and processing it, but as the noble Lord said, there is still a great deal of further waste, and more must be done.
Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts(5 years ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, it is with huge pleasure that I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, on bringing forward the debate today and the noble Lord, Lord Deben, on his report, because it is brilliant timing on both their parts. It has been a very happy time for me to listen to the debate; some of the speeches have been incredibly passionate and have saved my having to say some of these things—in fact, I have quite a few scribbles through my notes because others have said what I wanted to say and much more passionately.
It is notable that today we have had the news that the Indonesian Government have decided that they have to move their capital, Jakarta, because some parts of it are sinking at a rate of 10 inches a year. It is the first capital city to move for climate change reasons, which is perhaps an indicator of the way things are going.
For me, the Extinction Rebellion campaign has been a breath of fresh air. It has drawn the climate and ecological emergency to the forefront of political debate. It has moved the debate from whether all this is happening to when we can start to deal with it and thereby preserve humanity and some of our valuable ways of life. That it has been able to cut through all the Brexit noise and force politicians such as us to confront the issues is proof that its tactics are legitimate and highly effective. It joins the ranks of peaceful earth protectors across the world who risk so much in the pursuit of a safe climate and a secure future.
Extinction Rebellion has three simple, core demands. The first is to tell the truth, so that Parliament, having declared a climate and ecological emergency, must work with other institutions and other groups to communicate the need for change. The second is to act now. The Government must act now to halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025. The climate change committee’s report has made some valuable headway, but it was written before Extinction Rebellion’s campaign had really got under way. Sixty per cent of people agree with Extinction Rebellion’s aims, which means that the political climate outside these Houses has moved on and that we can be more ambitious. I am afraid that the net-zero aim of 2050 is not only unambitious but shockingly weak and will not take us to the place of safety that we all need. It is a game-changer; it is wonderful that it has happened, but it is not enough. The third demand by Extinction Rebellion is to go beyond politics. The Government must create and be led by the decisions of citizens’ assemblies on climate and ecological issues.
Let me go into those issues a little more deeply. Telling the truth means admitting that the Government’s existing climate legislation is too weak and too slow. It requires the Government to admit that they are planning to miss their legally binding climate budgets and are trying to find ways to water them down already. It means writing the Paris Agreement into UK law and sticking to the targets. It means having an honest conversation with the electorate about what this means and the scale of change that is needed to set us on the right course.
Telling the truth also means using the statistics and data honestly. It means no longer saying that we have outperformed by reducing greenhouse gas emissions while growing the economy, when we know that this has happened partly because we are importing more from other countries and pretending that their emissions do not count. We cannot fiddle the figures any more; the Government cannot cheat any more on this. Luckily, the climate change committee has advised including shipping and aviation emissions in government figures, which I hope will remove the option of Heathrow expansion, but we should also include our imports. There is always a lot of whataboutery in respect of China and other countries, which are perhaps not doing their bit. We have to accept that we are encouraging their emissions by our imports. We should take responsibility for those import emissions; at the moment, we do not.
Telling the truth means being honest with one another and with ourselves that this is a terrifying state of affairs. Anyone who is not afraid for the future of our planet is either uninformed or living in wilful ignorance. Acting now means taking at least the same amount of political will, Civil Service resource and legislative time that has been spent on Brexit and applying that to the climate and ecological emergency. It means a two-year parliamentary Session with a Queen’s Speech focused entirely on climate and ecology, cancelled recesses and endless statutory instruments. It means strong and far-ranging manifesto commitments from all the political parties which are then implemented obsessively for years to come.
We are acting for the future of our planet, for the future of humanity and for the future of our children and grandchildren. We are acting for the needs of nearly 8 billion humans on earth, along with millions of other species with which we share our home.
Acting now also means serious enforcement and legislation. It means massive state intervention in huge market failures, radical taxation and subsidies, nationalisation of certain industries and the creation of a million climate jobs. It means zero-carbon homes, enormous green infrastructure projects and forging happier, healthier lives with a much smaller footprint on the earth. It also means banning fracking and writing off huge fossil fuel reserves—I advise any Peers who have fossil fuel investments to get rid of them now.
I have had my six minutes; I am going to end. Greta Thunberg said that we should be panicking. Personally, I have been panicking for years. A friend of mine once said that my worst character flaw was saying, “I told you so”. I want to say to the House today, “I told you so”. We have to get on and actually make a difference.
Climate
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts(5 years, 1 month ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb
To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they intend to declare a climate emergency.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, I do not intend to rehearse the threats, challenges and opportunities presented by climate change, as these have been well covered in previous debates, but we know that climate change is real, it is here, it is now and we have to confront it. It cannot be dealt with tomorrow or the day after; it must be done today, every day of the year, and every year of every decade. It is the number one issue—not Brexit, not economic growth, not any of the other issues that we might feel passionate about.
My question today is whether the Government intend to treat the climate crisis with the urgency that it demands by declaring a climate emergency. We know from the world’s scientific community that fewer than 12 years are left to prevent 1.5 degrees of warming, which will cause huge problems for humanity—it is a massive threat. The Government’s policies and plans do not come close to meeting this deadline. An urgent and rapid global response is necessary, as has been recognised by 44 local authorities in the UK which have declared a climate emergency—that is since Carla Denyer’s motion in Bristol, with all those other councils following suit. Some 17,000 people have signed a petition on this issue, and thousands of young people across the country have been taking part in climate protests and school strikes to protect their future. And, of course, the campaign, Extinction Rebellion, and many other planet protectors are putting their bodies on the line to stop the disaster.
If we are to tackle the climate emergency, we must first call it a climate emergency—we have to acknowledge it. That would send out an essential signal to business, to industry and to the financial markets that our policies will be more ambitious and more stringent with time. Sending signals to the financial markets is crucial; fossil fuel companies and their reserves are heavily overvalued at the moment. There is a strong likelihood that we will see a fossil fuel crisis similar to the 2008 credit crisis once financial investors finally realise just how much of those fossil fuels have to stay in the ground.
That is why many people are calling for pension regulators to assess exposure to high carbon risk, for the Bank of England to factor in the carbon exposure of banks in its reserve requirements and for the London Stock Exchange to require all companies to make disclosure on fossil fuel risk. Pension funds, banks and other institutional investors have to be weaned off fossil fuels as a matter of urgency or their investments could go up in smoke.
There is no economic growth without the complex web of biodiversity that supports life on planet Earth. Climate breakdown will impact adversely on our ability to supply ourselves with water, food and safe shelter. It goes to the very heart of humanity’s safety.
The cumulative effect of CO2 means that it is not just a matter of hitting a target by 2030 or 2050. If we fail to act today, we have to do more tomorrow. If we fail to reduce CO2 now, the target for reductions in 2030 has to reduce even further to take into account our failures. Every failure of today’s generation imposes a new cost on the next generation. Today’s excesses are a cost that they have to pay.
It is a worldwide problem and we in the UK have to hit the brakes hard because of our historical legacy of the industrial revolution and the vast amount of CO2 that we import from other countries—we take that for granted and tend to ignore it. Everything has a cost somewhere to somebody. It does not matter whether it is toys for Christmas, circuit boards for our computers, or exotic fruits—everything we import has a CO2 burden.
No doubt the Minister will direct us to the Government’s Clean Growth Strategy as proof of how seriously they are taking climate change, but it is a very poor effort and extremely overoptimistic about the potential for change. Optimism is not enough. Optimism is often based in ignorance. We have only to compare the Government’s strategy to the scale of the government response to the investment in the project of delivering Brexit. The Clean Growth Strategy justifies inaction by looking at “a long term trajectory”, exploring “voluntary” standards and having aspirations,
“where practical, cost-effective and affordable”.
That is all absolute rubbish.
Meanwhile, Brexit is seeing billions of pounds ploughed into contingency planning, two-thirds of civil servants in some government departments are being told to drop everything to focus on this one issue, soldiers are ready to take over essential services, and several Bills have been rushed through Parliament alongside some 800 statutory instruments—all to fulfil a self-imposed deadline of two years, which has now been extended by a mere two weeks. If the Government can pull out all the stops to deliver on the so-called will of the people, I absolutely do not see why they cannot do the same for a climate emergency, which is the largest threat facing humanity.
Declaring the climate emergency is just the first step to treating the situation with the urgency it needs. The real policies come next. We need a green new deal which will create hundreds of thousands of jobs and a low-carbon economy, to enhance the Committee on Climate Change and to carbon-proof all new laws and policies—and we need billions of pounds invested by the Government to do this. The Treasury must not be afraid to increase the public debt substantially to head off this emergency.
Local authorities that have declared climate emergencies should be given a fund of money to go carbon-neutral by 2030. They deserve recognition by the Government for doing the right thing. The Government should set high standards that are enforceable and enforced, such as all new homes being carbon-neutral, and all existing homes being retrofitted to modern standards.
We have the Queen’s Speech coming up in May and the comprehensive spending review this summer. Now is the time for the Government to announce several new Bills alongside billions of pounds of funding to cope with the climate emergency. I see people taking a lot of notes, which I am very happy about; I hope it translates into action.
I assure your Lordships that Brexit planning is a drop in the ocean compared to the effort that we must put in to tackling the climate emergency; our great-grandchildren probably will not care whether or not we left the EU, but their lives will be permanently altered by whether or not we handled the climate emergency.
My conclusion is simple: when we fail to act today, we have to work twice as hard tomorrow. The Government must declare a climate emergency, taking climate change seriously in a way they simply have not envisaged so far. I therefore urge the Government to act now—today.
Buildings: Energy Performance
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts(5 years, 4 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Henley
My Lords, my understanding is that we have met our first carbon budget. We are on track to meet our second and third. I will take advice on where we are on the fourth, and write to the noble Lord.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, obviously I care about all the environmental aspects of these issues, but measures such as home insulation also create huge amounts of business for small and medium businesses, and thousands of skilled jobs. Why are they not at the heart of the Government’s industrial strategy?
Lord Henley
My Lords, we are all fully aware that the noble Baroness cares very strongly about the environmental aspects and I assure her that they are at the heart of our industrial strategy. We want to see people take the business opportunities of selling insulation and individuals then taking the opportunity to insulate their home.
Oil and Gas: UK Continental Shelf
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts(5 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Henley
The noble Lord is correct: we should do that. As his noble friend said, we should also continue with explorations. There is much that we can do, that the Government are doing and that the industry is doing.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, is the Minister aware of the carbon bubble—the possibility that the bottom could fall out of the market in oil and gas and general fossil fuel investment? Will the Government therefore give some advice on these risks to anyone who would like to look further at oil and gas? I raised this with the Bank of England a few years ago and it has since said some quite enlightened things.
Lord Henley
The noble Baroness makes a point but it is important that we continue to look at all available resources. The noble Baroness knows we are moving towards a low-carbon economy but we also want a balanced energy mix. It is important that we make use in the medium—and possibly long—term of the fossil fuels that we have.
Ffos-y-Fran Opencast Coal Mine
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts(5 years, 11 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, up to 60,000 people die in this country every year from air pollution. I fail to see how the British Government do not have a responsibility for lowering air pollution in every part of the union.
Energy: Home Battery Storage
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts(6 years, 5 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the potential for home battery storage to change the dynamics of energy supply and demand.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Lord Henley) (Con)
My Lords, the Government and Ofgem published a smart systems and flexibility plan in July 2017, which outlines a series of actions to support the transition to a smart energy system. They include an assessment of changes in our energy system and measures to address the barriers to storage, whether in the form of home batteries or the range of grid storage technologies.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
I thank the Minister for his reply. I am sure that the Government have thought this through—or not—but as nuclear subsidies increase and the cost of national grid electricity rises, more people will move to solar and domestic storage of energy. That means that people still using the national grid will be the poorest in society because they cannot afford all these extra measures. Have the Government thought through how the poor will be relieved of paying for very expensive electricity?
Lord Henley
Obviously there will be changes as more people make use of storage. That will have an effect on the grid because if some people increase their use of storage, they may even be able to go off-grid in future. The noble Baroness is right to draw the House’s attention to that issue. That is a matter for Ofgem; it can certainly look at that to make sure that it can create a level playing field for all consumers.