Climate Change Conference

Charlotte Leslie Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2010 Westminster Hall

[Charlotte Leslie (Bristol North West) (Con)]

Members might be relieved to know that I will keep my contribution short. The hon. Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) spoke with far more knowledge and detail and far more eloquently than I can, and covered many of the points that I wanted to make. That will, no doubt, come as good news to all. I wish to thank my hon. Friend the Member for Chippenham (Duncan Hames) for securing the debate. Our attendance today suggests that we need no reminder that climate change affects us all.

A perpetual challenge for climate change conferences is matching up the microcosmic with the macrocosmic: from the level of individual action to regional, national and international action. Putting that scale of possibility for action together is often the challenge that international climate change conferences run into.

Sidetracking for a moment, I am very proud to be a representative of Bristol North West. Bristol is a city that I will often criticise, but it has done extremely well in making itself a green city, with biomass plants in the Blaise nursery in my constituency, and in pressing for the wider, global impact of planning applications to be taken into account in the planning process. It might be slightly odd to raise a local issue when we are discussing such an international matter, but it demonstrates that to make progress we need not only ambition—an abstract thing—and legally-binding targets that embed hope in a legal framework, but action and strategy.

The hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) mentioned equity, the hon. Member for Brent North talked about China, and my hon. Friend the Member for Chippenham mentioned climate finance, and I shall talk briefly about those issues. Climate finance is an absolutely key issue. In recent discussions with some representatives from the Chinese Communist party, we talked about the perceived luxury of morality that developed countries have when it comes to climate change. As the discussion progressed, we began to unravel that the problem was having a judgmental morality rather than an enabling one. If I can suggest anything to people far more knowledgeable and experienced than me in these climate talks, it is that we need to shift from a judgmental morality to an enabling one, and to understand where countries such as China and India are coming from and the trade-offs that they have to make to reach the position—to which they aspire—of having the luxury of the morality that we enjoy.

The hon. Member for Brent North covered this issue in comprehensive detail, but I wonder whether we should flip the coin, and change from black to white, from sticks to carrots, and from constraint to opportunity. As he said, China has already demonstrated encouraging signs—perhaps surprisingly for much of the British media—that it is looking at climate change far more proactively than we may think, not only from the point of view of morality, but because it sees a great economic opportunity. Europe likes to think of itself as a leader in green technology, but we might have to start stepping up our game because China—this should be good news to everyone—is also stepping up its game substantially. It has already started to put climate change measures into legislation for the congress in 2011; it has committed to reducing its carbon intensity by 40 to 45%; and it might even, as the hon. Member for Brent North said, be willing to sign up to emission cuts, which is something that we can work on.

In particular, if we look at what Europe, and Britain as part of Europe, can offer, and at what we can bring to the table in an arena with two extremely big players, China and the United States, I suggest—and I recognise that I do not have as much knowledge and experience as other contributors today—that the best thing that we can offer is leverage. We could provide a lever to use China’s motivations and the opportunity they provide to nudge the USA into a far more co-operative position. We cannot do that by simply pushing; we cannot do it by endlessly enunciating ambitions; and we cannot do it by just creating expectations, embedding them in legislation and then somehow hoping that the existence of legislation makes things a reality. We have to be very strategic. The low expectations for Cancun are a massive opportunity, as are the low expectations of China. I very much hope that Cancun can be a massive surprise.