Low-carbon Growth Links (China)

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Thursday 18th April 2013 Westminster Hall

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

I am delighted to speak on this important matter under your chairmanship, Mr Betts, and I heartily endorse all that the Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for South Suffolk (Mr Yeo), has said, particularly about the very positive engagement between our Foreign and Commonwealth Office and China.

I address my remarks to the Minister in particular, as this is an area in which the Government need to do more. The Government now have a strong link and positive engagement with India, and they need to step up to the mark in the same way in China, reinforcing their commitment there. That would prove tremendously positive, not just for climate change and climate change negotiations, but for our own productive economy, including our exports.

At the GLOBE summit of legislators that took place a month before COP 15 in Copenhagen, Chairman Wang Guangtao and Congressman Ed Markey put their heads together. That was an extraordinary engagement, in that legislators from the two countries that have been seen, in some respects, as the key blockers to an international agreement came together and agreed a set of legislative principles upon which climate negotiations could advance. It is really in my capacity as chairman of the board of GLOBE International that I want to cast my perspective on the Select Committee report, and I should declare my entry in that regard in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, even though it is a non-pecuniary interest.

The International Energy Agency estimates that China will account for half the growth in energy-related emissions to 2030. For almost a decade, that is the sort of fact that has been used to vilify China, painting it as the villain of the piece, and politicians have sometimes used it as an excuse for inaction. Indeed, the fact that China produces so many emissions is one of the most trenchant arguments used, as we heard earlier, in the US Senate for taking no action on climate change. The Chinese economy will, of course, remain one of the most powerful engines of climate change for the next two decades, but at the same time the scale of its own ambition for decarbonisation will, I think, be a turning point in global efforts to halt the pace of climate change. China’s approach, although much of it based on domestic political reasons, because of the problems with pollution in its own cities, is driving China to take really positive steps to increase not the decarbonisation but the carbon productivity of its economy, at the same time as making great advances on renewables.

The International Energy Agency’s “World Energy Outlook 2012” estimates that by 2035 China will have increased its windpower capacity to 330 GW. That is 40% greater than the global wind capacity in 2011, which gives some sense of the scale at which China is moving. I have mentioned Chairman Wang Guangtao. He became the first president of GLOBE China when it was formed, but the relationship with China goes much deeper than that. The relationship is also with Minister Xie Zhenhua, who has, despite the recent changes in China, been reconfirmed, I am pleased to say, in his position as Minister for the next period—there was a question mark over what position he would end up with. The engagement that international legislators have been able to have with the Minister, and with Su Wei, who is one of the central figures under the Minister as the key negotiator and formulator of China’s policy in this area, has been extraordinary.

In October 2011, Minister Xie came to London as part of a delegation hosted by GLOBE. He met senior political figures from all three major UK parties—including Cabinet Office Ministers, the then Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change and the Leader of the Opposition—as well as senior Members of the European Parliament, and it was agreed that a regular second track to negotiations should be established.

In Venice in September 2012, that second track took off when the Chinese delegation—led by Su Wei, the director general of the Department of Climate Change in the National Development and Reform Commission—agreed the approach now being carried forward by China and GLOBE in Europe. As we speak, the unlikely team of Lord Prescott and Lord Deben is in China with a delegation of legislators from France and other parts of Europe to negotiate with the Chinese on an initiative about how the UK and China can work together to reduce carbon emissions through product standards.

My time is at an end, so I will sit down, although I could say much more on this subject. I believe that engagement with China is critical for the Government and the future of the negotiations.

[Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

Criminologists have observed that the victims of confidence tricksters are often willing—indeed, eager—to believe the story to which they fall victim, and the more absurd, fantastic or fabulous the story, the more willing they are to believe it. The report is an example of a confidence trick that has been willingly absorbed by the Government and members of the Committee. It contains all the characteristics necessary for the sort of fairy tale in which one wants to believe: it has a faraway country, mysterious powers that we attribute to ourselves, and pots of gold—green gold—at the end of the rainbow.

The first delusion affirmed by the report is the delusion of power. It is a strange hangover from liberal imperialism that the British intellectual classes believe that they can still dominate the world—that the world is anxious to hear from them, and will jump to attention at their every word and follow their every command. Take the opening words of the report:

“China is central to global efforts to tackle climate change”—

true, but it continues, and I ask Members to savour these words—

“and should be at the heart of HMG’s climate change mitigation strategy.”

What imperialist arrogance and what delusions of grandeur that the United Kingdom, a nation of 65 million people off the coast of Europe, could somehow direct, guide or in any substantive way influence the policies of the largest nation in the world, with 1.3 billion people, on the other side of the globe.

How are we to achieve that remarkable feat? The summary refers to

“our leadership role in China”.

Members should also savour those words. I read about the change of leadership in China last year, but I did not realise that that involved the replacement of Xi Jin Ping by “Greg Bar Ker” and “Ed Da Vey”—they apparently now have a leadership role in China to which the Chinese are now anxious to respond. The report states that, sadly, our

“leadership role in China is being undermined by our ‘image’…The UK’s image is also tarnished by the reputation of being ‘all talk and no action’.”

I wish it were all talk and no action in this country. When people who do not like windmills—I quite like them—look across our countryside and find that they blight the horizon, they wish there was more talk and less action. When people pay their household bills, they wish there was more talk and less action. Abroad, however, the word has apparently got out that we do not really mean what we say. I do not know how that has happened, but it will apparently be made worse if we do not inflict more problems on ourselves, because the report states:

“Slowing the pace of decarbonisation at home could undermine…the credibility of UK leadership on climate change.”

The second delusion is about China’s decarbonisation policy. The British intelligentsia has always been capable of convincing itself that China is a paragon of whatever is the current fashionable virtue. When I was at Cambridge, Professor Joan Robinson used to dress in a Mao suit and teach us that China had shown us a new economic model that we could all follow. Now it is doing the same on climate change. The report states:

“China has set out some of the most ambitious decarbonisation plans in the world.”

Yet, it also states that,

“half the growth in energy-related emissions from now until 2030 will come from China.”

Half that growth will come from the country that is pursuing the most ambitious decarbonisation policy in the world, and by 2030

“China could account for half of the world’s emissions.”

I submit that those two views are incompatible. Either China is pursuing the most ambitious decarbonisation policy in the world, in which case one assumes that it will decarbonise—or at least match our skills in reducing, or preventing the growth in, carbon emissions—or it will not.

Why is that rosy view of China’s emissions policies peddled? The British public have to be convinced that China’s emissions are under control. The report admits:

“The UK’s emissions reduction efforts are negligible compared with emissions increases elsewhere.”

In 2011, the increase in emissions from China exceeded the UK’s total emissions by 200 million tonnes. The device used in the report to convince us all that the Chinese are pursuing an ambitious decarbonisation policy is, first, to glide from talking about reducing emissions to talking about reducing emissions growth, which is not quite the same thing, and, secondly, to equate reduction in carbon intensity with cutting carbon emissions, which is not the same thing at all.

Like any sensible country, China of course wants more economic output from every tonne of fuel or joule of energy used. It enjoyed steady reductions in carbon intensity until the beginning of this century—not that it had any particular plan for CO₂ reductions; it just used energy more efficiently each year—but for some reason that stopped early in this century, and it now has plans to return to the same path of increasing energy efficiency each year. Despite such increasing energy efficiency, however, it will experience major rises in energy use and carbon emissions.

The third delusion is the prospect of green jobs in the UK resulting from exports to China. That prospect depends on the UK inflicting on itself severe and ambitious measures to decarbonise the UK economy. The report states:

“Slowing the pace of decarbonisation at home could undermine our low-carbon businesses and the export opportunities for this sector”.

What are the opportunities? The report states that the

“inquiry identified three sectors where…the UK has an established lead”.

What are they? The first is the oil and gas sector. It is true that we have expertise in oil and gas, but I would not have thought of it as a typical green sector. Indeed, the report states that,

“British expertise could help to ensure that”

Chinese resources are used

“in the most sustainable way possible. The UK’s own emissions profile has been improved by the ‘switch to gas’ and…a similar switch could be achieved in China, reducing emissions between 50% and 70%. Significant potential for gas development lies in the exploitation of unconventional resources.”

The report mentions shale gas in China, but not much encouragement has been given to that in this country, where we have had an 18-month moratorium and no drilling so far. None the less, the Committee’s report, which the Government have endorsed, believes:

“UK skills in the emerging market for unconventional ‘shale’ gas could help China to diversify its energy mix away from coal.”

Anything further from reality than the suggestion that we, who have held back shale gas development in this country and who—as we are told by the Committee, which has carried out an investigation—lack the expertise and will take a long time to develop our own resources, if they are there, can nevertheless help the Chinese to do so and then count that as a green export, would seem to me to be pretty bizarre.

The second sector is low-carbon buildings, primarily their design. That is fair enough. Let us send a few designers and architects over there and get the Chinese to pay their fees, but it will not revolutionise the British economy.

Interestingly, the third sector is carbon capture and storage. We are actually paying the Chinese to help them to develop the technology, and the report says that they already have a plant up and running. The idea that somehow the result is going to be us exporting carbon capture and storage technology to them when we are helping them develop a technology in which they are already further ahead than we are is bizarre.

[Barry Gardiner]

Am I right in thinking that the right hon. Gentleman genuinely believes that the expertise that this country has built up both from the North sea oilfields and in drilling in that technology is not something that we can export to China in helping them to develop shale gas?

[Mr Lilley]

We can certainly export to China the technical expertise that we have in the North sea, and we are doing so.

[Barry Gardiner]

What is wrong with the Select Committee report, then?

[Mr Lilley]

What is wrong with it is that such expertise has nothing to do with green exports. It is a delusion, and a deliberate delusion, to portray exports of expertise in oil and gas development as a green export. If the hon. Gentleman cannot see that, it takes my breath away.

Have we got the expertise in shale gas? We have not developed any shale gas in this country, onshore or offshore. So if we have expertise, it comes from operating in other countries and we may be able to transfer that to China, but again, it would not be a green export—although I can see that the Minister is about to tell me otherwise.