Wednesday 10th March 2021

(3 years ago)

Commons Chamber
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Bim Afolami Portrait Bim Afolami (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)
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It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas). If I recall correctly, Ronald Reagan had a quote on his desk in the White House that was along the lines of, “There’s no limit to what you can achieve or how far you can go, as long as you don’t care who takes the credit.” I see the role of the COP26 President as quite unusual in politics, because what the President, his team, this Government and this country have to do is get the world to agree to a set of different things along our achieved aims, and not care who gets the credit but get the job done. I have huge confidence in the COP26 President and his ability to do that.

I will not repeat what has been said about NDCs and various issues by other Members, who have made thoughtful speeches. I will identify three key areas in which I would like to hear the Government’s and the President’s plans on where we are going and how exactly we will achieve our aims not just as a country but as a world in trying to deal with this global problem. Those three areas are carbon emissions, carbon sequestration and rare metals, mining and manufacturing.

On emissions, we have already heard from many speakers about the need for a big increase in the number of countries submitting more ambitious NDCs. We all accept that, and I am sure that the COP26 President is working for it. The key thing that I am interested in is the plan to improve it. How will we try to achieve it materially? Even if we succeed in getting lots of countries to sign up for more ambitious net zero targets, which I am confident we will be able to do, and can back that up with concrete plans, in essence, in a few years’ time we will be going around this merry-go-round again. I am therefore very interested in the COP26 President’s plans for how we will achieve that.

To follow on from the remarks made by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion, who talked at length about the need for finance and mobilising climate finance, about which she is completely right, what are our plans to mobilise the asset of the City of London? There is huge good will in the City of London, as I know through the work that I do with the all-party parliamentary group on bankers for net zero and as chair of the all-party parliamentary group for renewable and sustainable energy—PRASEG—and through dealing with a great deal of liaison among APPGs, the COP26 President and the Government on COP26. There is a lot of enthusiasm, but how will the Government take that enthusiasm and positive energy and turn it into results on a global scale? Let me quote the Lord Mayor of London, William Russell, at a talk I was at recently. He said that the message should be:

“go green or go home”.

That is the message we should take to the City of London and to others.

On carbon sequestration, many experts—I notice that experts are back in fashion—have said that in order for us to achieve net zero by 2050, even if we decarbonise at the rate we all know we need to decarbonise at, it may be necessary to take something in the region of 120 gigatonnes to 160 gigatonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere. I had to look up what a gigatonne was. I knew that it sounded very big but I needed to work out how big. For information, it is 1 billion metric tonnes. Indeed, a metric tonne is 1,000 kg. That is a lot of carbon.

Getting the technology and achieving the target will require a huge amount of private sector innovation for technologies that have not yet even been invented in many respects. Government can help. In the United States, there is tax relief on carbon removals investment, for example. But we may need to do things to sponsor carbon removal markets and try to help consumers and businesses direct their spending on capital to new technology. One example is called Zero Exchange, which is led by Daniel Korski, Ryan Shea and Lichelle Wolmarans. There may be other examples, but this is one way of providing a carbon removal market. These are the sorts of innovative ideas that I would like to see championed at COP so that we can funnel capital that we know is there and harness that enthusiasm and energy into positive results to take carbon out of the atmosphere. That does not get enough attention.

Finally, on rare metals, up until the renaissance, human beings used about six or seven metals. In the industrial revolution, we used about a dozen. Now, with rare metals included, we are using in the region of 89 or 90. Why am I talking about rare metals in this debate? Rare metals such as lithium, which is key for batteries for electric cars and wind turbines; niobium, which helps us make energy-efficient vehicles and steel structures; and coltan, which is a key ingredient for mobile phones, do not come out of thin air. They come out of the ground. Most of those metals are not located in this country or even in Europe. The United States has a bit, but China has a significant amount and they are also found in sub-Saharan African and South America.

I have two questions related to rare metals and mining. This is something that none of us likes to think about, because we like to think of the green revolution as entirely clean, but, in order to make the green things, we will have to get some of those rare metals out of the ground. The first of my questions is an environmental one and concerns the standards of that mining. We must make sure that those standards are as high as possible so that we do not cause environmental damage, which, sadly, is the sometimes the case. The second is a geopolitical one. Are we content for this to happen just in other countries, or are we willing to do some of the heavy-lifting ourselves, and, indeed, to finance it as well?