Global Climate Change

Lord Borwick Excerpts

Thursday 29th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Borwick (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a trustee of the British Lung Foundation.

I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for tabling this important debate. He is absolutely right to highlight the need for action on global climate change. We as individuals can, and should, do what we can to help. We should turn off the lights when we leave the room, turn the heating off when we are not indoors and so forth. As a country, too, we should do what we can to help without paying over the odds and impoverishing bill payers. But the truth is that the difference we can make as individuals is tiny, and indeed the difference we can make as a country is tiny, in comparison with what is needed.

Countries such as China and India are growing at a rate of knots and are burning fossil fuels so quickly that any UK national strategy to curb climate change is rendered useless within hours. We know that China has had the biggest increase in CO₂ emissions and therefore any work to stop that growth at the UN conference in Paris later this month could be extremely valuable. So I welcome the opportunity to discuss this important issue.

I read recently that the London Weather Centre is about 1.8 degrees warmer than southern England and it has been since 1981. That of course has nothing to do with global warming: it is because of the London heat island. But if we add the 0.8 degrees average global warming, then central London is presumably about 2.5 degrees warmer than it once was. When we consider that much of the debate on global warming is about the disastrous effects of a change of 2 degrees, it is important that the discussion is level-headed and that we remember statistics in context.

Even so, there are much bigger decisions that we can take to help reduce emissions globally. Some of them involve being bold at home. For instance, we should fully embrace shale extraction. But equally as important is encouraging others to do the same to reduce reliance on coal. Sharing shale gas technology will allow it to develop as rapidly as possible and be used worldwide. A paper for the Centre for Policy Studies entitled, Why Every Serious Environmentalist Should Favour Fracking, by the noted University of California, Berkeley scientist Professor Muller, who I should declare I know personally, shows that shale gas extraction will actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A global switch to natural gas would be a big step forward.

While CO₂ may indeed be a global villain, air pollution is undoubtedly a local villain. Particulates hurt lungs today, right now on the streets of our towns and cities, particularly the lungs of children, so the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, is absolutely right again to highlight the urban environment in this debate. In the early 2000s, the focus was on CO₂ alone, but the evidence is now showing that that was a mistake. As part of the strategy to reduce carbon emissions, the Government encouraged people, using tax breaks, to switch to diesel cars. The RAC Foundation estimates that these tax breaks have helped to encourage UK citizens to buy an extra 2.7 million diesel cars since 2009. And, of course, exhaust fumes are poisonous. The poison may no longer be filled with lead, but it is particulates that we should worry about the most. Particulates bypass the human throat and, just like cigarette smoke, go right down into the lungs where they can cause the most damage. So the single-minded pressure on reducing CO₂ meant that engineers produced more diesel cars, which then led to higher particulates. That means we now have a disastrous air pollution level.

Volkswagen was one company that made a big switch to diesel at the turn of the millennium, but as tests for air pollution became more demanding, that company and probably other manufacturers decided to cheat. VW allegedly set up 11 million of its vehicles with “defeat devices” so that it could tell when they were in test conditions. The cars then temporarily emitted less toxic gas. But independent analysis showed how they emitted up to nine and a half times more toxic nitrogen dioxide when they were on the road. This scandal shocked and concerned me and millions of others. What is equally concerning was the news at the weekend that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs may have known that manufacturers were gaming the system as long ago as 2009. This weekend’s Sunday Times reported that Defra commissioned research which showed that when on the road, diesel cars were producing much higher levels of air pollution than was expected as a result of tests. Another report was allegedly submitted to Defra in 2011 which identified serious concerns with the testing. If those reports were submitted, then Defra should have acted, but of course VW should not have cheated. I hope that the reports, if they do exist, will be released and that in the future we will see real-world emissions testing to root out the bad guys. Moreover, instead of championing one type of fuel over another, perhaps we can look at ways of encouraging the purchase of electric vehicles, such as allowing them into bus lanes.

The evidence is now showing that it was a mistake to concentrate on CO₂ alone, as we did in the early 2000s. Air pollution is now a pressing problem and it has been greatly exacerbated by our focus on reducing CO₂ emissions. So while we should indeed take a global view on climate change, we should also do so on air pollution. Indeed, the presence of PM2.5 in the air currently kills more people annually than AIDS, malaria, diabetes and tuberculosis combined. But while local action on climate change does not make much of a difference, local action on air pollution can and would make a big difference. If the UK is to succeed in improving air quality, it needs to be embedded across all government departments. They all have some role in tackling what is an extremely serious problem.