Paris Climate Change Conference

Helen Goodman Excerpts

Thursday 19th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House notes the Pope’s Encyclical, entitled Laudato Si’, Our Common Home, on climate change and international justice which is an important contribution to discussions on this vital subject; further notes that the 2015 climate change conference will be held in Paris between 30 November and 11 December 2015; and calls on the Government to recognise the significant support for a successful outcome to the conference which should commit to take further steps to tackle climate change effectively in the UK and around the world before 2020.

I should like to begin by thanking the Backbench Business Committee for allowing us the opportunity to debate this important issue in the main Chamber today.

Pope Francis published his encyclical letter, “Laudato Si’, On Care for Our Common Home”, six months ago. In it, he says that he wishes

“to address every person living on this planet”

about the “urgent challenge” of “global environmental deterioration”. Following his namesake, St Francis, he writes that

“concern for nature, justice for the poor, commitment to society, and interior peace”

are “inseparable”. It is an astonishing and exceptionally rich document drawing on the experience of the Church around the world, scientists, philosophers, and civic groups. He calls for

“a new and universal solidarity”

in which

“All of us can co-operate”.

His main theme is the

“relationship between the poor and the fragility of the planet”.

He makes a particular appeal to politicians, saying that many of us

“seem mostly to be concerned with masking the problems”

when there is

“an urgent need to develop”

new “policies”. He calls on us to show “courage” and change

“established structures of power which today govern societies”.

This is why I and other hon. Members applied for the debate.

In looking at what is happening to the planet, the Pope contrasts the acceleration of change with the naturally slow pace of biological evolution. He is particularly critical of the “throwaway” society, saying that instead we need

“to adopt a circular model of production”.

He makes this important observation:

“The climate is a common good”.

For those who have not been keeping up with papal politics, things have moved on since Urban VIII put Galileo under arrest. Pope Francis embraces the work of independent scientific research and the benefits of technology to medicine, engineering, and communications. He points to the “very solid scientific consensus” on global warming and to our role in it through

“the intensive use of fossil fuels”

and “deforestation”.

In considering the

“biodiverse lungs of our planet…the Amazon and the Congo”,

the Pope is not afraid to challenge proposals that he says

“only serve the economic interests of transnational corporations”.

One of the worst things is that the cost of this violent “destruction”, as he calls it, is borne mainly by the poor. He draws attention to the increase in the number of migrants. We know that one reason for the huge increase in the number of people coming across the Mediterranean is the desertification of sub-Saharan Africa. We would be misleading our constituents if we pretended that we could tackle this without tackling the underlying causes.

The encyclical warns of the dangers of the developing situation whereby knowledge, resources and power are in the hands of a small number of people. As Oxfam says, the richest 85 families own as much as the poorest 3.5 billion. The Pope writes,

“a minority believes that it has the right to consume in a way which can never be universalized”.

He says:

“Inequity…compels us to consider an ethics of international relations.”

So he calls for:

“The establishment of a legal framework which can…ensure the protection of ecosystems…otherwise…power structures based on”

technical fixes “may overwhelm our politics”, our freedom and our justice. Put simply, the world system is unsustainable.

The Pope is very clear that we need a change of heart, and naturally enough he draws on the creation story, asserting that nature is not solely a source of profit and gain, and:

“Whether believers or not, we are agreed…that the earth is…a shared inheritance, whose fruits are meant to benefit everyone.”

An important consequence of that is that we must have equal concern for future generations, and another is that private property is always subject to a social mortgage. The Pope says:

“Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain. We may well be leaving to coming generations debris, desolation and filth. The pace of consumption, waste and environmental change has so stretched the planet’s capacity that our contemporary lifestyle, unsustainable as it is, can only precipitate catastrophes, such as those which even now periodically occur in different areas of the world. The effects of the present imbalance can only be reduced by our decisive action, here and now.”

What is the Pope’s positive agenda for change? First, he wants us to understand the world as a whole and to see that strategies to tackle the environment need to incorporate economic and social change. Individuals can and do change their behaviour in worthwhile ways, from turning down the heating to sorting the rubbish, but they can also press for change through consumer boycotts, involvement in campaign groups and pressurising politicians. This morning I was particularly glad to meet people from the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development, who have come to support us in this debate.

The Pope is very keen to encourage ecological education that goes beyond facts, to challenge our culture. Action can be taken at local and national level. He points to the co-operatives established to provide renewable energy projects and to help small-scale farmers. In his description of the changes in cities, we see clearly his Latin American perspective, with calls to improve housing, public transport and neighbourhood planning. All those things happen in some places some of the time, but for the planet to survive they need to happen everywhere all of the time. In an interdependent world, none of that will be enough without international action, which is why holding this debate before Ministers go to Paris is so important. Global consensus is essential and technologies based on fossil fuels need to be replaced, but the international community has not reached adequate agreement about responsibility for paying for that transition.

Looking at recent history, the Pope points out that, although the 1992 Rio summit set out goals and actions, it was

“poorly implemented, due to the lack of suitable mechanisms for oversight, periodic review and penalties in cases of non-compliance…Reducing greenhouse gases requires honesty, courage and responsibility”

from those who are most

“powerful and pollute the most.”

International negotiations will not make significant progress while positions taken by countries place national interest above the global common good. It is important that internationalisation of environment costs do not penalise the poor. As the Bolivian bishops have said, the countries that have benefited most have a greater responsibility.

What is needed is global regulatory norms and enforceable international agreements, and that means institutional reform at the international level—

“an agreement on systems of governance for the whole range of so-called ‘global commons’.”

The Paris conference is a real opportunity to move things on.

In her letter to the Chair of the Energy and Climate Change Committee, the Secretary of State wrote that

“UK priorities include seeking to agree a five yearly cycle of review that would provide the opportunity to reflect on progress and increase ambition…capitalising on the falling cost of low carbon technology. This will be important as we do not expect the cumulative commitments contained in countries’ INDCs to be enough to put us on track to meet the…2 °C goal. We are also building support for legally binding rules to help ensure transparency and accountability so that there can be confidence that the action committed to is being taken.”

That has been the British Government’s position for some time, but I honestly do not think it is strong enough. First, instead of saying what we must do to keep the global temperature rise to 2 °C and then sharing out the burden, it allows a bottom-up approach that is inadequate and necessitates more difficult and costly action later—or, of course, the possibility of failure.

Secondly, I am not clear what “legally binding” means when there seem to be no penalties. It is time we got tough with those who flout the rules. In other arenas, international bodies levy fines, penalties and sanctions. Why does that not happen in this area? Let me give just one example. We issued sanctions against Russia for its actions in Ukraine, but Canada left the Kyoto protocol to avoid penalties and we have taken no action against it for that.

Let us be clear: people in the deserts of Africa and those affected by the floods of Bangladesh are already dying as a result of climate change. If we are to be serious, we should make other international organisations, such as the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund, subordinate to what is agreed in the United Nations framework convention on climate change and co-operate substantively with it.

When I was preparing for this debate, I asked my researcher to find the Government’s latest published position. Imagine my surprise when she produced a White Paper on which there was a picture of the happy, smiling face of the former Lib Dem Secretary of State, Ed Davey. The document includes a quote from the current Secretary of State:

“The move to a green economy offers a great opportunity but to be fully realised it requires world leaders to provide certainty, clarity and confidence. The UK is a global leader in developing cost effective policies and innovative technologies”.

I cannot square that with the Government’s actions since May. They have removed the climate change levy exemption; removed the subsidy for onshore wind; restructured vehicle excise duty; ended the zero-carbon homes commitment; cut the support for solar; and yesterday they committed to a further dash for gas. None of that looks like a Government doing their best to decarbonise. The Pope is asking us to be prepared to make sacrifices in the interests of the common good, but the Government’s changes are so drastic that they will damage our own economic interests.

[Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

The hon. Lady is making an interesting speech. She has listed a number of points and I share some of her concerns, but on dash for gas, yesterday’s announcement was about getting rid of coal-fired power stations and all their pollutants and replacing them with gas. No journey to 2050, however ambitious, will not involve interim measures, such as replacing coal with gas. If she wants to give a balanced speech that takes everyone with her, she should acknowledge that.

[Helen Goodman]

Of course, it is true that coal-fired power stations will eventually cease to be effective and that they would have to be closed anyway, and it is good that the Secretary of State has formalised that commitment. However, by investing in new gas-fired power stations, we are committing, not just for now, but for 30 years, to a reliance on imported gas. That is problematic, partly because it does not improve energy security and partly because it will not result in decarbonisation.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

Is my hon. Friend aware that, of the 10 coal-fired power stations that are still in operation, three were due to close next year in any event and that all but two of the others were likely to close by 2023? Therefore, by saying that there will be no unabated coal by 2025, the Secretary of State has spun an extension of coal-fired power stations into an ending of unabated coal. That is a neat political trick, but it is not exactly where we want to be.

[Helen Goodman]

My hon. Friend is extremely well informed. I was not aware of those points.

[Rebecca Pow (Taunton Deane) (Con)]

Had Opposition Members invested in energy infrastructure when they were in power, going for gas right now would not be urgent. Indeed, had they even thought about investing in renewables, we would not be in the situation we are today. This Government are taking all that on board and trying to sort it out for the taxpayer by providing energy from a mix of energies.

--- Later in debate ---

[Helen Goodman]

I admire the hon. Lady for the energy she shows in this debate, but we have heard people in the sector say there is a problem—I will give a couple more examples—because 30,000 jobs are now being lost in small-scale solar and wind, which is very significant.

[David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)]

I want to go back to the point about gas and coal because it really is not good enough to leave it where we have. If the world did what we have done and removed coal from the system, it would be equivalent to increasing the current amount of renewables in the world by a factor of five. To pretend that that does not matter is to mislead us all.

[Helen Goodman]

It is good to remove coal—there is no contention about that—but it would be better to replace it with more solar and more wind. That is the simple proposition I am making.

[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for taking this frenzy of interventions. One thing she has not so far said—she must forgive me if I am not completely au fait with His Holiness’s utterances on this subject—is whether he mentions investment in technology. Surely the lesson of the history of humanity is that science has broadly solved pretty much all our problems when they have presented themselves to us.

Some significant technologies are a little starved of Government investment across the world. I have a particular enthusiasm for the fuel cell and the hydrogen economy that will, I hope, replace the carbon economy in my lifetime as one that is less damaging to the planet. Does she agree that perhaps one thing we should do at the Paris summit is to agree—much as we have on dementia, for instance—that global action on investment in technology and science can solve these problems as much as behavioural change can, not least with the hydrogen economy at the forefront of global considerations, as many countries are now realising?

[Helen Goodman]

The hon. Gentleman makes a reasonable point. Of course we need new technologies. One of the problems at the moment is that people trying to invest in new technologies—for example, big battery storage technologies—cannot get funding. They cannot even get them funded by the UK Green Investment Bank. I do not think it is very helpful to privatise the Green Investment Bank when that is the case, or to change the policy framework, which means that we will lose the clarity, simplicity and confidence that industry needs in order to plan its investment over the medium term. We cannot just switch this on and off like the lights; we need to think about it decades ahead.

[Kit Malthouse]

I am sorry to repeat myself, but that was broadly my point. I was trying to make the point about the Paris conference that, as much as the hon. Lady says the emphasis should be on an agreement about behavioural change by business and industry, there should be a global agreement on investment in exactly the technologies that she says are starved of money. That might mean the Government having to make up for a market failure by investing in them to a certain extent. Nevertheless, as she says, given that we need a decadal view—out to when my grandchildren will be born—such investment needs to put in now. It may be that that has to be paid for out of the global public purse.

[Helen Goodman]

The hon. Gentleman is right that we need to have intelligent investment in technology, but I want to draw him back to paying a little attention to the Pope’s encyclical. An over-reliance and an over-optimism about technical fixes when we do not know whether they will actually work has encouraged us to consume too much and to be too destructive. We need to keep such things in the balance as we develop policy.

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

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for making a powerful speech. She is talking a lot about the papal encyclical—rightly so, since the motion is about it—but will she also pay tribute to things such as the declaration launched in August by Islamic leaders from 20 countries, which similarly urges Governments to take ambitious action in this area? This is not a monopoly of one faith community or another; all faith communities are coming together to make such a demand.

[Helen Goodman]

The hon. Lady is of course right.

The White Paper included a section on the importance of small and medium-sized enterprises. I am afraid that it was greeted with a hollow laugh by people such as George Smith from my constituency. He is an electrician—I have had a ride in his solar PV-powered van—who has spent thousands of pounds training people, but is now concerned that he may have to sack those very people.

Many of us were incredulous about the Government achieving their renewables targets. In the Treasury Committee, I asked the Chancellor whether he was a climate change denier. He responded:

“I am not sure I accept that phrase as a general term in British politics”.

Now we know why: the leaked letter from the Secretary of State to her colleagues says that there will be a 50 TWh shortfall in the delivery of renewable energy targets in 2020, which is a shortfall of 25%. She notes:

“Publicly we are clear that the UK continues to make progress”.

She also notes:

“The absence of a credible plan to meet the target carries the risk of successful judicial review, and…on-going fines imposed by the EU Court of Justice”.

Instead of going back to the Chancellor and saying, “We must think again,” she says that

“we need to reflect...on the emerging strategy once the outcome of the Spending Review is known.”

Strategies do not emerge; they are planned. Fulfilling our part in avoiding global warming over 2° C should be the Secretary of State’s absolute priority.

[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

Does that not show that Britain’s climate change policy is being run not by the Department of Energy and Climate Change, but by the Treasury?

[Helen Goodman]

That is also my suspicion.

The Secretary of State now proposes to buy renewables from other countries. That is not a way to support British industry. It will not maximise the EU contribution to the global deal. It is not consistent with the argument put to this House by Ministers for abolishing the climate change levy, which was that too much money went abroad.

I am very grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for giving us the opportunity to discuss this important issue. The Paris conference is absolutely vital to our making progress. I urge the Secretary of State to reflect seriously on her responsibilities and to work for the best possible deal in Paris.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Edward Leigh]

I am happy to accept that. I do not want to weary the House by referring to the paragraph, but the Pope does endorse action on climate change. That is a relatively small part of the encyclical and it must not be seen in the context of the political debate. The hon. Member for Bishop Auckland was right to mention conferences and what is going on in Paris, but I do not think that the Pope is concentrating on that. What he is concentrating on, fundamentally, is the theme that we are part of nature. The debate around climate change relates to his profound belief that we are part of nature and connected to nature, and that we are abusing the world. Because we are abusing the world, we are abusing ourselves. I think that that is what he is trying to say, and that is what I am trying to explain to the House in my very inadequate way.

[Helen Goodman]

The hon. Gentleman has obviously thought deeply about these matters and has given more of the theology than I did. However, the Pope does talk about the need for more effective international action and he does decry what we politicians have done up to now.

--- Later in debate ---

[Helen Goodman]

I am grateful to all hon. Members who have contributed to this excellent and worthwhile debate on a very important issue. Over the next few weeks, many people will have their eyes on Paris, hoping and praying for a good agreement. I will give the last words to Pope Francis, who asks

“that we may protect the world and not prey on it,

that we may sow beauty, not pollution and destruction.”

He says:

“Enlighten those who possess power and money

that they may avoid the sin of indifference,

that they may love the common good…

and care for this world in which we live…

help us to protect all life,

to prepare for a better future”.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House notes the Pope’s Encyclical, entitled Laudato Si’, Our Common Home, on climate change and international justice which is an important contribution to discussions on this vital subject; further notes that the 2015 climate change conference will be held in Paris between 30 November and 11 December 2015; and calls on the Government to recognise the significant support for a successful outcome to the conference which should commit to take further steps to tackle climate change effectively in the UK and around the world before 2020.