Net Zero

Baroness Worthington Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Worthington (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, for securing this debate. I echo her comments about the sheer number of opportunities ahead of us in the near term to address some of the recommendations in legislation before us, whether that is the Energy Bill, the Procurement Bill or the financial services Bill.

I also congratulate Chris Skidmore on not just the nature of the report but the process he undertook to gather evidence, which was comprehensive and cross-party—and done in such a short space of time as well. I have not heard a bad word said about it. There is absolutely no way one can do justice to the sheer weight of the report’s recommendations in four minutes, so I will focus my comments on a specific, interesting issue in the report: the definition of net zero.

One of the recommendations that your Lordships will read features a new phrase, “geo zero”, meaning that we must unpick the concept of net zero to better understand what we are talking about when it comes to addressing fossil-based emissions—which are essentially bringing emissions out from under the ground, out of the lithosphere, and leaving them in the atmosphere for 1,000 years—and what we are doing with our biosphere, which is changing our land-use patterns. Altering that is a very dynamic process of changing over time and in accordance with weather and climatic conditions. That is a very different set of uncertainties and data about how reliable that portion of our carbon account is.

The lithospheric, or geospheric, balancing act that we need to do to make sure that any fossil brought out of the ground is neutralised by permanent storage in the lithosphere must be addressed. It is a recommendation of this report. It is incredibly forward-thinking of Chris to have got his head around not only the day-to-day but this fundamental problem. It is important because increasingly we are seeing concerns about the sheer number of claims around carbon neutrality—“I’m net zero” or “I’m carbon neutral”—even to the extent that we have had coal mines approved based on being carbon neutral. No real standards apply to what that really means. Coal mines really cannot be equated with the vague planting of some trees somewhere in the world which may or may not survive. It needs some definition. This is an opportunity for the UK, because we happen to have some of the world’s leading scientists, land-use experts, agricultural colleges and carbon accountants, with probably a higher concentration of them here than anywhere else. So it is within our capability to do this.

We also have a tall tower network of very clever and very sensitive monitors that allow us to see what is happening in our atmosphere. People perhaps do not understand that when we submit plans to the UN or targets and budgets to the CCC, we are doing so on the basis of an inventory, which is essentially a spreadsheet, with people putting in numbers and hoping that those numbers are correct. However, we have these tall towers with sensors on them to cross-check whether that inventory appears to be correct. We have a proper, real-world, empirical backstop to our carbon budgeting. We are possibly the only country that does this. The only of two that have invested in this are New Zealand and Switzerland—so we are in a very fortunate position.

Therefore, with our desire to become a centre for green finance, our efforts to green the financial markets, and the fact that we have a huge number of people who are talented on this issue, we could start to develop proper, regulated standards that govern the market in carbon offsetting and carbon neutrality claims. We can do this. We should do this. It is in this report. I wish that I had more time to go into it. It is something that I strongly recommend that the Government take very seriously.