Climate Change: Phasing Out Fossil Fuels

Lord Bellingham Excerpts

Wednesday 6th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The responsibility belongs in a different department so I am not sure of the exact date of the regulations the noble Baroness refers to, but I will certainly write to her on that.

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, will the Minister find time today to remind the House of the extent of the UK’s progress on the route to net zero? I think we are 58% of the way there, compared with France at 40% and Germany at about 48%. Can he confirm those figures, which put the UK in a really strong position and put the Prime Minister’s recent remarks in context? Can he also say something about his views on carbon capture and storage, and whether he feels it has an important role in the reduction of greenhouse gases?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I do not need to find the time to do it, because my noble friend has just done it. Our record is an excellent one. We decarbonised faster than any other G7 nation between 1990 and 2021, cutting our emissions by around 48%. We were the first major economy to set a net-zero target in law. I am grateful to my noble friend for reminding us of those key facts. He is also right to talk about carbon capture, usage and storage, another area in which the UK has fantastic potential. We have already committed £20 billion of expenditure on CCUS. We have announced the first two industrial clusters and we are powering ahead with negotiations with those clusters. We hope to make some final investment decisions on that by quarter 3 next year.