State of Climate and Nature

Earl Russell Excerpts

Monday 21st July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Offord of Garvel (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to respond to the Statement made by the Secretary of State in the other place a week ago.

The state of climate and nature is one of the most important areas of policy that we can discuss in both Houses. However, true to form, the Secretary of State took advantage of a reasoned and evidence-led Met Office report to promote his own ideological pet project—clean power 2030—and to denounce any critic of his as anti-science, anti-jobs, anti-energy security and anti-future generation. That is a great shame.

As I have said many times in this House before, I am not a climate change denier. I have been to the Arctic and have seen first-hand the effects of global warming on the ice caps. To disagree with the Secretary of State is not climate denial, especially when we see that his unilateral acceleration to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030 is ideologically driven and already putting the UK on a rocky road to economic ruin.

The Secretary of State referred to the need for “radical truth-telling”; perhaps it is time that he listened to his own advice. The leader of the Opposition, Kemi Badenoch, was right to say that net zero 2050, on its current trajectory, is impossible to achieve without serious cost implications for British taxpayers and industry. Even prominent Labour figures, such as Tony Blair, have argued in recent months that the Miliband plan is “riven with irrationality”. The GMB Union chief, Gary Smith, has warned about the decimation of working-class communities if we continue to shut down North Sea oil and gas.

At the heart of the Statement is a fundamental misunderstanding of the new global order. As much as the Secretary of State may wish to turn back the clock, we are no longer in 2008, when he introduced the first Climate Change Act, or in 2021, which represented peak global enthusiasm for net zero. The world has changed. In February this year, only 10 of the 196 countries party to the Paris Agreement submitted updated climate targets to the UN’s deadline. Of those, only three of the G20 countries, including the UK, submitted an updated target. Only one country reaffirmed the 2050 target with a pathway: the UK, representing 1% of global emissions.

Even the former high priests of net zero have accepted that the world has changed. Dr Fatih Birol of the International Energy Agency has now said that oil and gas will play a key role in global energy policy for decades to come. That is very different from his 2021 position of “No new hydrocarbons”. The Secretary of State talks up the need for the UK’s global leadership, yet today the UK has one of the highest energy prices in the world, which limits our growth and employment, and this is self-inflicted. Our country may have been the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution—indeed, the birthplace of AI—and today we are still leading the world in high-tech engineering, and advanced avionics and propulsion systems; but comparable major economies are not looking at the UK’s energy policy as an example of global leadership. They view us as a canary in the net-zero coal mine. The point is this: if we run ahead of the pack and fail, the pack will not follow.

Let us examine the real implications for climate and nature of the accelerated drive to clean power 2030. The Secretary of State wants to cover our green and pleasant land in solar panels and pylons. He talks of the dangers to our bird species, yet he wants to fill our skies with blades and turbines. He wants to compensate for the deficiencies of wind and solar technologies with battery energy storage, but neglects to consider the dramatic impact on our world of the mining of the critical minerals needed to support his plans. He talks of science, yet he does not accept the science of intermittency nor allow time for new technologies to emerge. The evidence is clear: solar farms will generate power 11% of the time. What shall we do for the remaining 89%? Onshore wind farms will generate power 26% of the time. What shall we do for the remaining 76%? Offshore wind farms will generate power 41% of the time. What shall we do for the remaining 59%?

The Government propose batteries as a solution to intermittency, but the battery anodes are made from petroleum coke and coal-tar pitch, and the battery cathodes are made from the mining of nickel, manganese, cobalt, iron and phosphate. Ironically, the source of the solution is the very materials that are vilified, and the mining of which is now prohibited in the UK. Has the Minister turned a blind eye to how open-pit mining disrupts habitats and landscapes, and how this extraction impacts water and pollution? I put these facts squarely to the Minister. The Government’s plans for clean power 2030 simply offshore our emissions and our jobs to other countries. Is that really what the Government meant by a “just transition”?

In conclusion, I submit that ideology at either end of the spectrum is deeply unhelpful. Whether it is clean power 2030 at one end, or “drill, baby, drill”, at the other, the harsh reality is that energy is a highly complex area which needs a pragmatic rather than an ideological solution. The Statement in the other place from the Secretary of State was an example of grandstanding without substance. This is what I hear time and again from policy professionals, academics, and leaders in the industry: there is no silver bullet; there is no one simple solution. But surely, we can coalesce around a pragmatic energy policy which is sane—first, secure; secondly, affordable; and only thereafter, net-zero emissions.

[Earl Russell (LD)]

My Lords, we on these Benches welcome this Statement, issued in response to the Met Office’s State of the UK Climate report, our most authoritative assessment of the UK’s changing weather patterns. We also very much welcome the intention to make this an annual update.

We see this Statement as a message of hope—that together we can start to reverse the impacts of climate change. Our climate has changed in my very own lifetime. The science is absolute, and our scientists are some of the best in the world. We are as certain of man-made climate change as we are that the earth is not flat. The Met Office report focuses on 2024, when the UK experienced its second-warmest February, warmest May and warmest spring since records began in 1884. The last three years have all been in the UK’s top five warmest on record. Mike Kendon, the Met Office report’s lead author, said:

“Every year that goes by is another upward step on the warming trajectory our climate is on. Observations show that our climate in the UK is now notably different to what it was just a few decades ago”.


The Met Office calculates that the UK is warming at a rate of around 0.25 degrees Celsius per decade, with the 2015-24 period 1.24 degree Celsius warmer than 1961-90. The UK is also getting wetter, with rainfall increasing significantly during the winter. Between October and March, rainfall in 2015-24 was 16% higher than 1961-90. The new normal is even more extreme.

These indisputable ground truths are an urgent and unmistakable call to action. Nature bears witness and suffers these unparalleled and accelerating changes. We are already one of most nature-deprived nations on earth. One-third of our natural species has been lost from UK biodiversity in my lifetime. Nature is struggling to adapt, just as we are. To those politicians who have given up on efforts to tackle climate change and remain happy to take funds from the fossil fuel companies, I say, you offer no solutions and no hope to our children. Like the tobacco lobby of the 1970s, who said, “One more puff of cigarette smoke in your lungs won’t hurt”, they say, “What are a few more tons of CO₂ in our atmospheric lungs?”

The UK green economy grew by 10.3% last year. A green future is our only future, and it is a good future. Global green growth is our future climate solutions, our future energy security, and our future economic prosperity.

Those who say that we cannot afford the cost of preventing climate change never calculate the devastating consequences of not doing so. Analysis from the New Economics Foundation showed that the reversal of climate policies would cost the UK economy up to £92 billion, almost 3% of our entire GDP, and mean the loss 60,000 jobs before the end of the decade. British leadership is global leadership. When we work together at home, we lead the global conversation. We are lucky: we have the knowledge, we have the technology, and we have the time to enact change. We join calls for a return to this powerful cross-party consensus on climate change. We will always seek political co-operation on these common challenges.

It feels as though Labour has found its voice and will improve its communications—and better communications are required. I ask the Government to also tackle the growing problem of misinformation and disinformation. Their own message needs to be more coherent and consistent: less talk of nature protection as a blocker, and more honesty about the complexities and challenges that we face. The nature and climate challenges are interlinked and interdependent. Nature is not only nice to have but essential to all life. Labour’s messaging on nature has been muddled, but I thank the Minister for the amendments that have been brought forward to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill. These are indeed welcome.

It is vital that we build new, clean energy infrastructure, but, equally, we must support nature recovery. This Government must champion the benefits of joined-up actions on climate and nature policies. Labour’s green mission is overly centralised: it is being done to us and not always with us. If Labour fails to work with and include our communities, public support will erode. The Government must listen to and take our communities with them. They must stop trying to do it all alone and empower and include our communities to help with the task. My party has suggested how new energy market reforms could be brought in to bring about reductions in our energy bills. These matters are urgent, so I ask the Minister: when will the Government be able to bring forward their plans to reduce our energy bills?

We must mitigate and adapt; both are needed. Not a single adaption delivery pathway plan was rated as good. The simple truth is that we have been better at changing our climate than we have been at adapting to the changes we ourselves have made. Our duty as politicians is to co-operate, create change and enable hope.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Baroness Hayman of Ullock) (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord and the noble Earl for their interest in the Statement.

Going on some of the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Offord, he seems to be a bit glass half-empty at the moment. I encourage him to work with the Government to become a little more positive in his outlook. First, he asked about the cost of net zero. We believe that growth and net zero go hand and hand. Net zero is the economic opportunity of the 21st century, and it can support the creation of hundreds of thousands of good jobs across the UK and protect our economy from future price shocks from reliance on fossil fuels alone. We also believe that this is the way forward to getting the UK better energy security and to deliver a range of social and health benefits. Last week, the OBR showed clearly in its latest report on risks to the government finances that the cost of cutting emissions to net zero is significantly smaller than the economic damages of failing to act, as the noble Earl, Lord Russell, just said.

Both noble Lords asked about bills. We are determined to cut bills for people. We appreciate that they have been high in recent years and the basis of our clean energy superpower mission is to look at how we can do exactly that. If we just carry on as we are, we are exposed to expensive, insecure fossil fuels, as we saw when Russia invaded Ukraine and prices went through the roof. We are driving forward with renewable power and with nuclear, because that is the way, in the long term, that we get to cut bills. We are also looking at how we cut the cost of electricity as part of that, so that, for example, if you put in a heat pump it makes financial sense. We have to look at it all along those lines.

Renewable infrastructure and the impact on nature were also mentioned by the noble Earl, Lord Russell. We believe that nature recovery and preserving our ecosystems are an essential part of the clean energy superpower mission. As we unblock barriers to the deployment of these clean power projects, we are committed to ensuring that, wherever possible, nature recovery is incorporated in development stages and that innovative techniques can be used to encourage nature recovery—the noble Earl mentioned the amendments that we are making to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, for example—because we want to get that balance right.

The noble Lord, Lord Offord, also talked about jobs. We are working very hard to bring in a just transition that is fair and built on the principle of fairness, because we need to ensure energy security and protect prices, as I said, but also to ensure fairness for workers, because decarbonisation has to be seen as the route to reindustrialisation. Working towards net zero and adapting to climate change are essential if we are to prevent widening inequalities and to reduce inequality as it stands. We know that if we do not act, climate change impacts more severely the most vulnerable groups, so we have to move forward on this.

The oil and gas sector was mentioned. We know that oil and gas production in the North Sea is going to continue for decades to come. We want to manage its reduction in a way that ensures the just transition and that our offshore workers can continue to work in the industries of the future. We are publishing a response to the consultation on the North Sea energy future later this year. That will look at how we can address the transition of oil and gas workers into working in clean energy. On that point, Robert Gordon University notes that over 90% of the UK’s oil and gas workforce skills have a medium to high transferability to offshore renewables.

Last time, when we had coal and steel collapse and communities were left behind, that had a terrible impact, and we are determined that that will not be the case this time, so we are working in partnership with trade unions, businesses and local communities, investing in skills and running regional skills pilots in places such as Aberdeen and Pembrokeshire.

The question was asked: why should we bother when other countries are not pulling their weight? That is not exactly true: other countries are acting. Over the last decade, there has been a transformation in the extent to which countries are taking it seriously. At least three-quarters of global GDP is now covered by a country-level net-zero target. This rises to 80% when taking account of commitments made by subnational governments. India is often mentioned. It has a target of 500 gigawatts of non-fossil fuel capacity by 2030 and of reaching net zero by 2070. China is also committed to peaking its CO₂ emissions by 2030, with a target to reach net zero by 2060. I could go on.

Consumption and emissions were talked about, as well as offshoring emissions. There has been a substantial overlap between our carbon footprint and territorial emissions. This means that our ambitious carbon budget targets and commitment to making Britain a clean energy superpower will reduce our carbon footprint in the process of reducing our territorial emissions. The latest figures do not show that we are offshoring emissions from the UK to other countries. As the CCC states in its 2025 Progress in Reducing Emissions report:

“The reduction in territorial emissions since 1990 significantly outweighs the increase in emissions from imports over that period, reflecting the fact that emissions reductions in the UK have largely occurred without offshoring emissions”.


I thank the noble Earl, Lord Russell, for his support for the Statement, but also for his clear recognition of the huge challenges that we face in tackling climate change. I completely agree with him on the complexities that he was referring to. As he said, we absolutely need that balance between nature and development.

The noble Earl, Lord Russell, also talked about the global impacts. I assure him that we are committed to working internationally and to multilateral action. We are not going to address climate change and the nature crisis on our own. The UK is steadfast in its commitment to the three Rio conventions, which aim to protect the global environment, the landmark Paris Agreement and the Kunming-Montreal global biodiversity framework. We also have international milestones coming up such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity. We will reaffirm our commitment to working with partners around the world to scale up integrated solutions that deliver for climate and nature. That will include demonstrating how our plans at home are working to make people in the UK safer, healthier and more prosperous.