Oral Answers to Questions

Callum McCaig Excerpts

Wednesday 16th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

Certainly, speaking as someone who has been through this battle a number of times, eventually relatively successfully, lots of people find different ways of doing it, and clearly for some people e-cigarettes are successful. We need to be guided by the experts, and we should look at the report from Public Health England, but it is promising that over 1 million people are estimated to have used e-cigarettes to help them quit or have replaced smoking with e-cigarettes completely. We should be making it clear that this a very legitimate path for many people to improve their health and therefore the health of the nation.

[Callum McCaig (Aberdeen South) (SNP)]

Q3. During the referendum the Prime Minister pledged to deliver carbon capture and storage at Peterhead, something he reiterated in the Tory party manifesto, yet on the eve of the Paris climate talks he pulled the plug. Which does he see as the greatest betrayal—that of Scotland, that of his manifesto, or that of the entire planet?

[The Prime Minister]

Of course the greatest success is the Paris climate change talks. I want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, who was one of the key negotiators who helped to deliver this global goal, which is so much better than what happened at Copenhagen and better even than what happened at Kyoto.

Let me answer the hon. Gentleman directly on carbon capture and storage. In government you have to make tough choices. You have to make decisions about technology that works and technology that is not working. We are spending the money on innovation, on energy storage, on small nuclear reactors, and on other things such as energy heat systems for local communities that will make a difference. To govern is to choose, and we made the right choice.