Climate Change: COP 26

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

When I look at the climate change argument, I am reminded of a friend of mine who was in a failing business. When the accountant left, he was praised for measuring its decline with great accuracy. I get that feeling because we have put an enormous amount of energy into measuring the decline and looking at things that have gone wrong. We have not spent as much energy finding the answers and solutions, except in the vaguest sort of ways.

Is it not interesting, this really weird situation, in that most of the damage to the world has been done in the last 60 years, since Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring and published it in 1962? In fact, the first 50% of the damage done to the world took thousands and thousands of years. Then you get to 1960, when the world’s population was 3 billion, and going forward you have this world in which everybody seems to be hyperventilating about the wrong we are doing to it.

I find it extraordinary that there is a plethora of organisations, hundreds of thousands around the world, that are totally committed to doing something about the environment, but one thing they will not do is work together. There is no convergence, no concatenation, no coalescence. It is almost like a replica of the marketplace in the City of London or Wall Street. Organisations will have nothing to do with each other but are supposedly going in the same direction. In my opinion, that is the biggest intellectual crisis we face today and the question we have to ask the Government to help us resolve. How can we resolve the fact that we are all so committed to the environment in hundreds of thousands of organisations that will not concatenate, come together and do things?

I went to COP and had a brilliant time. I was very impressed by what the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, said. I went into the blue zone and thought, “God, I’m in a car show!” It was like the Earl’s Court car showroom I used to go to quite regularly. There were all these people selling products; some of the stuff was pretty good. There are some brilliant answers out there. For instance, there is this kind of bacterium that eats plastic. There are all sorts of things; I met a woman who has developed a bacterium that eats nuclear waste. I met another woman who has invented a way of turning air into water at 68 degrees. There are all these energies and solutions. In this very difficult time, the role of the Government must be to bring those energies together.

I do not want to sound like an old historian—I am a self-appointed historian—but I look at what happened in the Second World War and the marvellous thing that Britain did, which nobody really ever talks about any more: the war effort. There was a convergence of energies. Little bits of aeroplanes could be made here, there and everywhere, and it was all converged. I think it was Herbert Morrison who did it. It was wonderful. We need that again and we need it now, because the talking needs to be over.