UN Climate Change Conference: Government Response

Clive Betts Excerpts

Wednesday 16th January 2019 Westminster Hall

[Anna McMorrin]

I thank the Minister for her intervention. I think that it is a wider point, and a very important one, to talk about the impact that Brexit will have on our domestic legislation here in the UK. For example, the loss of EU environmental legislation, which covers roughly half of the UK’s emissions reductions up to 2030, and losing our place as a key advocate of bold action within the EU, will demolish, at a single stroke, Britain’s role as a key player on climate change. We cannot solve this climate crisis as a single nation; climate change recognises no borders.

As I saw with my own eyes in the Arctic recently, climate change is already wreaking havoc on our world, our communities and those who need us most, and it is only set to get worse. It is time for the UK Government to face up to the imminent risks and show leadership. Our response to climate change will define us for years to come. It must be a bold part of the work of every single Government Department, leading the way from the top down to the bottom up. We are rapidly reaching crisis point, and we need to start acting like it.

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

I think I have three hon. Members who want to catch my eye, which means basically five minutes each, if they could keep to that. I call Mary Creagh.

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

Thank you very much indeed for that guidance, Mr Betts, and for your courtesy in calling me to speak. I am aware that I arrived a little late, but I was doing some media on the report on sustainable seas by the Environmental Audit Committee. I was over the road to do that, before running here through the rain.

May I begin, Mr Betts, by saying what a pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship today, and to have such a brilliant and committed member of the Environmental Audit Committee as we have in my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff North (Anna McMorrin)?

Safeguarding the future for the planet and for our children is one of the defining challenges of our generation. The climate change conference—COP24—was a real opportunity to take decisive action in this area. I will very quickly focus on the scale of the challenge, the solutions that are already available and, of course, the finance that we need to put behind any action.

I will start with the Arctic, which I and the rest of the Environmental Audit Committee visited last year. We saw for ourselves the unprecedented extreme weather that the Arctic faces. The climate is a closed system, so when we warm the ocean, the climate redistributes that heat through the winds, the currents and our weather. We are performing a giant experiment on ourselves, our planet and our oceans, and it really is a very dangerous experiment.

In 2018, the Arctic experienced its third winter heatwave in a row. During winter polar nights—so no sunshine—there were temperatures of 28°C in the Arctic this year. We know that the average temperature rise of 2°C disguises the extremes in temperature that we see at the North Pole. For example, a 1°C rise at the Equator means a 7°C rise at the North Pole, and the temperature in the Arctic has already risen by 5°C, which has huge impacts on the mammals that live there, and of course on the humans who live there, even down to the way that they build their houses.

In this country, we had the “Beast from the East” in March 2018. We were proud to launch our inquiry into UK heatwaves with the snow lying thick on the ground. The Committee Clerk turned to me and said, “Chair, nobody wants to give evidence about heatwaves when there’s snow lying on the ground”, and he was right. But we struggled through that and launched our heatwaves report in 35 °C of searing heat, and we had the hottest ever summer in England. These are extraordinary times. I was walking in the Peak District above Sheffield, Mr Betts, up Lost Lad hill, and I looked at the Derwent reservoir, which was only 75% full, and the village of Derwent and its church spire were now visible.

The world’s leading scientists have warned us that we have just 12 years to avoid devastating climate change. They gave us a report that spelled out the difference between a 2°C rise and a 1.5°C rise. Under a 2°C rise, we lose all the world’s coral reefs; under a 1.5°C rise, we lose “just” 90% of them. That shows the damage that is already baked into the best-case scenario. Of course, in the UK heatwaves raise the spectre of heat-related deaths, such as those in 2003, when there were 2,000 excess deaths in just 10 days. We have never known so much and we have never realised before just how much we have to do.

Our Committee produced a report on greening the finance system and we heard that the carbon bubble presents a huge systemic risk to our investments and our pensions. It presents liability risks, as oil and gas companies are potentially sued; some of them are being sued by the state of New York for some of the damaging issues that came with Storm Sandy. It presents physical risks to us, including the risk of tidal and coastal surge, and of course the transitional risk. If someone’s pension is invested in an oil and gas company and that company cannot get its reserves out of the ground without reaching 4°C, 5°C, or 6°C of warming, their pension is essentially valueless.

We need to move very quickly to green the financial system to avoid a carbon bubble bursting in an unmanaged way. We also need to move much more quickly to mobilise green finance into our economy: into solar, wind, and the new technology that we need.

The two tried and tested examples of carbon capture and storage come from nature: soils and forests. We conducted an inquiry into soils and globally the top foot of soils—the 30 cm of soil around the Earth—holds double the amount of carbon that is in the atmosphere, and more than all the carbon held by all the forests and the oceans combined.

Soils are absolutely critical and I am really glad that the Government signed up to the 4 parts per 1,000 initiative last year. What concerns me is that we do not have a route map to achieve that goal. We have got some great scientists in the UK; they know what the soil content has been over the last 50 years. We need to start paying farmers, through the common agricultural policy, or whatever succeeds it if we leave the European Union, to make sure that we measure, monitor and increase our soils’ carbon content.

I agree wholeheartedly with my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff North about withdrawing the finance for feed-in tariffs and the difficulties that the green deal has had, including the problems that people have had with it, and the scrapping of the energy efficiency measures in our homes. If we want climate solutions, we must also have climate justice, which means keeping people warm and safe in their homes.

The climate conference was held in Katowice, a coalmining region of Poland. Can I make a bid that, if the UK holds the climate conference in 2020, we hold it in the coalmining region of Yorkshire, which is an example of how we can swiftly move to the new green economy and create jobs in the process? I am sure that Sheffield, Mr Betts, Wakefield and Leeds would be happy to argue the toss over who should win that bid.

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

I call Alex Sobel to speak, but only for four minutes now, I am afraid.

--- Later in debate ---

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

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Betts, and I again congratulate the hon. Member for Cardiff North (Anna McMorrin) on securing the debate. The UK has historically played a leading role in global climate negotiations; for example, it pressed for the 1.5° ambition in the 2015 Paris agreement. However, in the words of the former UK climate envoy, John Ashton,

“Rule one of diplomacy is, walk your talk: otherwise people stop listening”.

The tragedy is that in recent years, the global leadership role that the UK played on the international stage has been undermined by the systematic dismantling of climate policy at home. We have heard some of this already, but since 2010, Ministers have scrapped zero carbon homes; sold off the Green Investment Bank; made it almost impossible to build onshore wind farms; cut off support for solar power; made no progress on phasing out fossil fuel subsidies; gone all out for fracking, which is quite extraordinary given that that is a whole new fossil fuel industry; and in the area of energy efficiency, which is all too often a poor cousin in these debates, we are woefully behind on some targets—for example, retrofitting some of our most energy-inefficient homes. According to the Institute for Public Policy Research, we could be over 50 years late in getting that target sorted.

The impact of those failures is incredibly real, and we have heard from the Committee on Climate Change that once again, the UK is way off meeting its fourth and fifth carbon budgets. “With each delay,” it says,

“we stray further from the cost-effective path to the 2050 target.”

Beyond that, the sad truth is that even if all those policies were still active, it would not be enough. The problem is that our economy is built on the assumption that precious minerals, fresh air, clean water and rare species can magically regenerate themselves in an instant, and that somehow the Earth will expand to meet our ever-expanding use of resources. The reality is that we have stretched the planet beyond its limits and, without a bold reimagining of how our economy works, it will simply not be able to spring back into shape. The UN 1.5° report made clear that we need to cut emissions to net zero by the middle of this century, but the global economy is set to nearly triple in size during that same period. That makes the job of decarbonisation massively greater.

Greta Thunberg, a 15-year-old climate activist, told world leaders at COP24 in December that

“if solutions within the system are so impossible to find, maybe we should change the system itself.”

She was right. Of course, we need massive investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency and a new, clean public transport system, but we also need to think far more boldly about the way we integrate concerns about our natural world in the way we run our economy. Crucially, we need to limit the resources that we all use. Those in the global north who can radically reduce how much they consume and throw away must do so. We must find new and innovative ways to recycle and reuse materials; there is much talk of dematerialisation and decoupling from energy and consumption, but the truth is that there is no example anywhere in the world of absolute decoupling in anything like the timeframes that we will need if we are serious about getting off the collision course that we are currently on with the climate crisis. We have a huge job of work in front of us.

I am really grateful for this debate, and I want to add one last thing: my quick scan of Hansard suggests that over the past year, there has been only one debate in the main Chamber on climate change. That is not good enough. I hope that we can reinvigorate the all-party parliamentary climate change group, and I invite everyone at this debate to join that APPG so that we can be a bigger force in this place for better climate policy.

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

We will now hear from the Front Benchers. The Scottish National party and the Labour party spokespeople each have five minutes, and the Minister has 10 minutes.