Net Zero: 2050 Target

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 6th June 2023 Westminster Hall

[Kwasi Kwarteng (Spelthorne) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Government policy on reaching Net Zero by 2050.

It is always good to see you in the Chair, Sir Christopher. This is the second time in about seven years that I have been able to introduce a Back-Bench debate, so I am very grateful for the opportunity.

I am pleased to be able to say that the net zero agenda—the energy transition—enjoys wider support across the House than practically any other area of policy. Yes, there are sceptics on both sides of the House, but it is extraordinary how widely shared the ambitions for net zero and decarbonisation are. I am grateful to organisations in my constituency and to my constituents. I thank Talking Tree, whose climate emergency centre has promoted decarbonisation in my constituency, and my constituent Hettie Quirke, who has raised these issues with me in constituency surgeries and provided me with my inspiration, or certainly my motivation, for requesting the debate.

This is a matter of great interest to me personally. I was fortunate to be appointed Energy Minister, the post that my right hon. Friend the Minister now ably fills, in July 2019, only a few weeks after we as a Government had passed the net zero Bill and enshrined the 2050 net zero target in law. That target was not simply plucked out of thin air. It is based on a scientific assessment of what we need to do as a global community to keep average temperature increases on this planet below 1.5° compared with 1990.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman recognise that at the time when the net zero by 2050 target was agreed, so was the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities? That means that countries such as the UK that can go further and faster must do that, so we should be looking at something much closer to real zero as soon as possible after 2030, not net zero by 2050.

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

As the hon. Lady well knows, she and I have very different views on this. I think that the Government have to carry the population with them, and it was interesting to hear what the unions were saying about oil and gas earlier this week. I would like to be able to press a button and say that we can get to absolute zero by 2030, but I do not think that is possible given the technological constraints and the financial and fiscal pressures. I do not think it is attainable, which is why I am happy to push the target of net zero by 2050.

I want to talk about our ability to reach that target. The hon. Lady is right that we could and should always try to do more, but we are constrained not only by technology but by fiscal necessities and, I might add, by what is going on in the rest of the world. The UK represents only 1% of global GDP, but we are an example and a leader, and we have to be able persuade partners across the G7 and the G20 and particularly in the developing world. As she will appreciate, that is not always easy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Christopher. I welcome this debate on Government policy on reaching net zero by 2050 and I congratulate the right hon. Member for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng) on securing it.

I would like to start by setting out the context for the debate. Ministers are very fond of pointing out that the UK’s emissions have almost halved since 1990. However, when we are, in the words of the UN Secretary General,

“on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator,”

relying on past progress is not enough. Secondly, that figure ignores emissions from imports, focusing only on emissions from the things we produce domestically. Frankly, if we outsource most of our manufacturing, it is not surprising that our emissions go down. We have just outsourced them to countries like China. But we cannot outsource that responsibility and we must not. If we take a consumption-based approach, the UK has only actually reduced its emissions by 23% since 1990. That is equivalent to an average cumulative reduction of just 0.7% a year. That is hardly transformational.

In the short time I have, I want to focus on what is at the heart of the climate crisis, which is our seemingly insatiable addiction to fossil fuels. Frankly, it does not matter how many good things we do or how many renewables we bring on line if, at the same time, we continue to pump yet more filthy oil and gas, and continue to license more oil and gas fields, as the Government plan to do. Let me just make three quick points.

First, new oil and gas will not bring down bills. The right hon. Member for Spelthorne himself noted in February last year:

“The situation we are facing is a price issue, not a security of supply issue…Additional UK production won’t materially affect the wholesale market price.”

Well, I could not agree with him more. He gets to the nub of the issue: we have an energy affordability crisis, not an energy supply crisis. Fossil fuels are not only heating our shared and only home, but are so expensive that they have plunged millions of UK households into fuel poverty, all while oil and gas companies have raked in obscene, record-breaking profits. Our dependence on oil and gas is the very reason for high energy bills. It is somewhat perverse, therefore, that anyone would suggest that they can also be the solution.

We know by now that the way to bring down energy bills is to unleash truly abundant renewables, alongside storage and batteries, and to properly insulate homes to keep them warm over the winter months. It really is not that complicated. It should shock us all that energy bills are now a staggering £9.8 billion higher than they would have been had Government Ministers not “cut the green crap” a decade ago.

Secondly, new licences will not improve energy security, contrary to Ministers’ claims, because it is not our oil and gas—it is owned by private companies, who sell it on global markets to the highest bidder. In fact, the UK’s gas exports increased following Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine in response to high European demand. Even if it did belong to us, the majority of fossil fuel projects in the pipeline are for oil, not gas, and we already export around 80% of the oil that we extract because it is not the type used in UK refineries.

That is before we even talk about the fact that despite disingenuous protestations, no one is talking about turning off the taps tomorrow. We are saying that there should be no new licences for projects, which would not come online for many years to come. I refer the right hon. Member for Spelthorne to Lord Deben, the chair of the CCC, who has said how much he supports the policy position of no new licensing of oil and gas. He is a prominent member of the right hon. Member’s own party.

Finally, let us put to bed the idea that, somehow, producing oil and gas domestically is better for our planet. It is commonly asserted that the oil and gas extracted from the North sea than has lower emissions than imports. Although that is certainly the case for liquefied natural gas, imports of which have undoubtedly increased in the last year, it is not the case for Norwegian oil and gas, where the majority of our imports typically come from. In fact, the UK’s production is two-and-a-half times more polluting than Norway’s because the UK uses practices such as flaring and venting, which have been banned in Norway since the 1970s.

Furthermore, the Government maintain that new extraction is entirely in line with delivering net zero, but that is only because they have washed their hands of emissions produced when the oil and gas are burned—otherwise known as scope 3 emissions. Surely those have to be taken into account if we are truly to understand the impact of fossil fuels produced in the UK. The Climate Change Committee has been clear that extra oil and gas extracted in the UK will

“support a larger…market overall.”

When the International Energy Agency and so many other experts say loudly and clearly that it is simply not compatible with our climate change objectives to be pursuing new oil and gas, we simply should not do it.