Climate Change Conference

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2010 Westminster Hall

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

I thank the hon. Member for Chippenham (Duncan Hames) for securing this important debate. According to the Prime Minister’s own words:

“The dangers of climate change are stark and very real. If we don’t act now, and act quickly, we could face disaster.”

I agree absolutely, but that action must be driven by science, not political expedience. Although I welcome the fact, for example, that Britain is leading the way in passing climate change legislation, the targets in that legislation must be commensurate with the scale of the challenge that we face.

The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research suggests that if we are to have a good chance of keeping the atmospheric temperature rise to less than 2° C above pre-industrial levels, thereby significantly reducing the likelihood of catastrophic climate change, average global emissions must be reduced by far more than the figures being bandied about in political debates. The institute discusses an average global emissions reduction of about 60% of the 1990 baseline by 2030. That is a global average: the responsibility of developed countries is even greater, because of course we are and have been overwhelmingly responsible for climate change. That responsibility equates to a 90% reduction in emissions by developed countries by 2020.

We face a monumental challenge, but it is important to put the figures on the table in order to remind ourselves of the scale of that challenge, as well as to remind us that equity and social justice must be at the heart of any new climate agreement. Many models have been proposed that encapsulate equity, ensuring that we move towards a situation in which each person has an equal right to a certain amount of emissions per capita. The models involve technical terms such as contraction and convergence, but they are essentially concerned with ensuring that we tackle climate change equitably. There is no way that we will get an agreement at Cancun unless equity is at the heart of it.

One of the biggest obstacles to progress at Cancun will be a potential lack of sufficient finance on the table for developing countries. International climate negotiations have stalled, not least because developing countries have no great faith that the industrialised north will deliver on its financial commitments to help poorer countries tackle their emissions.

At the Copenhagen summit last December, world leaders pledged £100 billion by 2020 to fight climate change. First, that figure, although welcome, is not enough. Secondly, the history of such pledges is not a happy one. Far too often, the pledges are not kept. If the money is forthcoming, it is simply re-badged money that has already been committed, rather than genuinely additional resources. Although I welcome the £2.9 billion committed by the Government to climate finance, I also understand that that money is not additional to the existing aid budget. Will the Minister clarify that? It is crucial, as the hon. Member for Chippenham said, that the money is additional and not a redirection of existing aid.

It is also clear that even with the £2.9 billion, we will need further, innovative financing mechanisms to raise more money urgently. A range of options has been discussed this afternoon, including a tax on aviation, but I want to discuss the so-called Robin Hood tax. It could be a critical instrument in helping to break the deadlock on global climate agreement negotiations. A tiny bank levy on financial transactions, if applied globally, could generate billions of dollars a year and provide poor countries, which have done the least to cause climate change, with the money required to cope with its impacts and to develop in a greener way. Although a Robin Hood tax would certainly be more effective if it were implemented globally, it need not be. It is important not to go away with the idea that it can only be done globally. Plenty of research suggests that it could be done nationally without giving the UK a massive competitive disadvantage, that we could take a lead on that positive initiative and that, even if the tax were only imposed in this country, it would still generate significant amounts of money.

Rich countries and corporations have grown wealthy through a model of development that has pushed the planet to the brink of climate catastrophe. We have overused the planet’s ability to absorb greenhouse gas emissions. As I said, developed countries representing less than one fifth of the world’s population have emitted almost three quarters of historical emissions. In a sense, the rich world has colonised the Earth’s atmosphere, and that process has mirrored and perpetuated the vast economic inequalities that persist in the world today.

Meanwhile, poor communities—those least responsible for climate change—are already facing its worst impacts. It is happening now to people in Bangladesh, for example, and in many other parts of the world. Sometimes I hear people say, “We need some climate disaster to happen to wake the world up to the seriousness of climate change.” Those disasters are happening now, and we need to wake up, make that link and put them on the front pages. Because of the rich world’s historical responsibility for climate change, we have a duty to compensate the world’s poorest people. That means finding climate-friendly ways to meet their energy needs and providing resources to assist them in coping with the effects of climate change.

The rich world’s climate debt can be described as mitigation debt and adaptation debt. I will give a few more numbers, as they sometimes help to concentrate the mind. They are large numbers, but they remind us of the scale of the challenge that we face. A report published last year by the World Development Movement and the Jubilee Debt Campaign calculated that based on its historical responsibility, the UK’s adaptation debt equates to at least £5.5 billion a year over the next 40 years, provided that it stops increasing that debt immediately: in other words, provided that we start absolutely reducing our emissions now. The same organisations make the case that we owe at least £11 billion a year for the next 40 years in mitigation debt. Those resources must be made available to enable us to share low-carbon technologies freely with the developing world and to fund low-carbon infrastructure. I acknowledge that that is an enormous amount, and we must use every tool available to generate it. Models such as the Robin Hood tax are some of the simplest and most effective that we could develop.

Cancun is just a few weeks away. Industrialised countries desperately need to be able to go to those talks with a new, big commitment on finance if we are to have any hope of reaching agreement. I hope that the Minister will tell us today that some new financial commitment can be made, and that he will say whether he supports the principle of contraction and convergence, or any similar model of dealing with climate change that has equity at its heart and is based on the idea that we must converge to a situation where everybody in the world has an equal per capita emissions right. That will not happen in the next years—it will take several decades—but we must get to the point where equity is at the heart of climate change negotiations, because right now it is not.

I will end by reflecting on political will. I am haunted by the words of the actor Pete Postlethwaite in the film “The Age of Stupid”. For those Members who have not seen it, the film is based on the assumption that some kind of climate catastrophe has occurred 50 years hence and that Pete Postlethwaite’s character is the sole survivor. He looks back to today and asks, “Why is it that, knowing what we knew then, we didn’t act while there was still time?” Those words haunt me, because we have the information, technology and, frankly, the money that we need to act. When it came to bailing out banks, we found billions in a few days. If the planet were a bank, it would have been sorted out a long time ago.

The issue comes down to political will. It can be stated simply. Will we generate sufficient public and political will to tackle climate change fairly in the time available, or will we go down in history as the species that spent all its time monitoring its own extinction rather than taking active steps to avoid it? It worries me that only about a dozen hon. Members are here today. This Chamber should be packed—there ought to be a presence on the streets ensuring that it is packed—because this is the most important issue that we face.

Finally, if we were to take climate change seriously and introduce the measures that we urgently need, those measures would create hundreds of thousands of green jobs and improve our quality of life. For example, we would have fuel-efficient homes—people would not die from the cold in the 21st century—because we would have a proper programme of home insulation. We would have affordable, efficient public transport—they seem to manage it on the continent, but it somehow still evades us in Britain—and we would have kids playing in the streets again because our roads would not be packed with cars. We would also have a quality of life that, in many respects, would be more fulfilling and, crucially, there would be more jobs. At a time of economic austerity, people need jobs and there is no quicker means of job creation than to have a programme based on green jobs, insulation, environmental efficiency and renewable energy. I hope very much that the Minister will be able to tell us that he has got some good news on all of those issues when he sums up.