Climate Change

Baroness Sheehan Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sheehan (LD)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Teverson both for bringing such an important debate to your Lordships’ House and for the breadth and depth of his introduction.

We in the UK have accepted that climate change is caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. We have committed to, and even led, international efforts to tackle climate change, including the 2015 Paris Agreement and the SDGs, especially SDG 12. As a member of the EU and the G20, we are party to the pledge to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, so why are we coming under increased criticism over our support for fossil fuel subsidies? A headline in yesterday’s Guardian stated that UK has the “biggest fossil fuel subsidies” in the EU. I know that the Minister will deny the claim, citing the Government’s own definition of a fossil fuel subsidy—which, by the way, is at odds with the WTO definition as agreed by 153 countries, including us. For the sake of argument, I will call it “UK financial support for fossil fuel projects”.

Although figures are hard to come by—transparency around this subject is a real issue—research conducted by the Overseas Development Institute and CAFOD shows that between 2010 and 2018, UK Export Finance supported a total investment of £3.8 billion in the exploration and production of dirty fossil fuels. Compare that to the paltry £29 million invested to support renewables over the same period. On the domestic side, the ODI figures show that in 2015-16, fiscal support for fossil fuel-based power for both industry and consumers totalled a whopping £7 billion. Surely it is time to stop the blanket subsidy and the support for fossil fuel-based power and instead target help towards poorer people both here and in the developing world.

A fundamental change is needed in our choice of the industries we want to support; such changes must be carefully managed in a responsible way, ensuring a gradual phase-in, with the retraining of workers and making sure that the removal of subsidies does not harm the poor and vulnerable. With the £7 billion to be released annually, we should be able to manage that. The fact is that corporations and the well-off among us benefit from this financial support, which is hardly fair when schools, hospitals and other public services are starved of cash.

Let me digress slightly and mention the “Give it up” scheme being trialled in India, where people have been asked to give up voluntarily their liquid petroleum gas subsidy. Some 10 million people have done so. The money generated is being used by the Government to provide cooking gas to poor families—now there is an idea.

Air and sea currents see to it that no matter who is responsible for pumping greenhouse gases into our atmosphere, the malign effects of climate change are felt across the globe. Poorer countries are the least culpable but they bear the most catastrophic consequences. I will quote from an article in this Tuesday’s Telegraph, which began:

“Mega-storms the size of England are increasingly savaging countries across the Sahel”.


The article, based on UK-led research, stated that,

“the Sahel—which hugs the Saharan desert from Senegal to Eritrea—has seen a threefold increase in mega-storms over the last 35 years. The ferocious storms—which produce roughly the same amount of energy in 12 hours that the entire UK consumes in a year—”

almost 6 billion gigajoules—

“can devastate everything in their path”.

Professor Chris Taylor from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, who led the research, said:

“Global warming is expected to produce more intense storms, but we were shocked to see the speed of the changes taking place in this region of Africa”—


the Sahel. That region is already plagued by poverty, irregular migration, smuggling and terrorist groups. I fear that we reap what we sow.

In November 2018, the International Energy Agency warned that the world has so many existing fossil fuel projects that it cannot afford to build any more polluting infrastructure without busting international climate change goals, which we now know are at the very limit that our planet can withstand. When the IEA, normally a very conservative agency, issues such a warning, we must take heed. But there is another way. The market in renewables is racing away. According to the IEA, solar generation in developing countries is forecast to expand from 2% today to nearly 10% by 2040. Battery storage costs are dropping rapidly and hydropower is set to remain big. The age of the internal combustion engine is over. Fossil fuels have had their day and it is time to stop using them and start to clean up after them. Locking Africa into dirty fossil fuel technology is to shackle it to the past, when the future is green. In the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu:

“People of conscience need to break their ties with corporations financing the injustice of climate change”.


We should not be subsidising fossil fuels. It is wrong.

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

My Lords, can I ask noble Lords to adhere to the allocated time? Any headroom we had has now gone and we will be biting into the Minister’s speech. Your help would be appreciated.