Lord Deben
Main Page: Lord Deben (Conservative - Life peer)
Lord Deben
My Lords, I refer the House to my declarations of interest and particularly to my chairmanship of the Committee on Climate Change. In that position I am bound by statute to be independent, and on this subject it is not difficult to be independent because all parties have a less than good record in facing up to the issues of energy. The noble Lord who spoke a moment ago was kind. Successive Governments have recognised that this is a tough thing to deal with and often better left alone. At one stage we had an energy Bill in which every date had been removed except 2050, which was well beyond the lifetime of any living politician. This enabled people to promise good things for the future without having to pay for them in the present. This Bill is entirely different and I congratulate the Government on bringing it forward. It seeks to face the real issues and accept the price of facing them. Sitting where I do geographically, I recognise that there are some who have not accepted the reality of the danger, so I ought to start by explaining why—for a simple reason—we do not have to argue about it.
There is no doubt that there is sufficient scientific belief and evidence that climate change is happening, is caused by human beings and could be disastrous. It is therefore a threat with which we have to deal. There are two ways that you can deal with a threat: the first is to insure yourself against it, and the other is to hope for the best. There is a problem with the climate-change deniers. I use the word denier because they are no longer sceptics. I am a sceptic—I wish that climate change did not happen. I am sceptical in the sense that I work with scientists, and therefore one is sceptical about everything that is put forward. The problem is that those who deny climate change start from the assumption that it is not happening; that if it is happening, we do not need to do anything about it; or that if we did do something about, it would be far too expensive.
In this Bill we are seeking to provide the insurance that any sensible father would have for his children. I am sure that there are no Members of your Lordships’ House who do not take out insurance against their house burning down, although there is a 99.8% chance of it not burning down. Yet we all spend about £140 a year protecting ourselves against such a thing happening because the horror of it is so great that it is not something that we wish to carry.
The chance of disastrous climate change occurring is enormously greater than the chance of your house burning down, yet we are now seeking to say that we should not spend certain sums. At the moment, for an average family the cost is about £60 a year and by the end of 2020 it will be £100 a year. We might increase that by about £20 if we take the serious and important step—I say this to the Minister—of having a carbon intensity target for 2030. Thereafter, what we will have insured against will in fact provide us with lower energy costs and a real future.
Therefore, the choice is between accepting the infallibility of those who deny climate change and accepting sensible insurance in order to recognise what the vast majority of scientists are putting forward. There really is no argument, and there is no argument in the view of the public. That perhaps explains why, however difficult it is, there remains, and is increasingly, a demand by the public that we do something sensible about this.
The question is: how do we get the very important matter of electricity reform to deliver a decarbonised source of energy for us? We cannot do all the things that we need to do to meet our statutory requirement of reducing our emissions by 80% by 2050 if we are not able, for example, to use electricity in a pure and clean form for motorcars and the like. Therefore, electricity decarbonisation is an essential part of what we are doing and the Bill paves the way for that. It does so by giving sufficient security to private investors to invest, but I warn the House that many other people are seeking to do the same.
Those who deny the issue, of course, are always saying that we are the only people doing this and that we are right out in front. In fact, GLOBE International, of which I am president, recently produced an independent report with the London School of Economics showing that more than 33 countries are dealing with this issue, some of them more extremely and better than we are doing. China, for example, has made a huge investment in making itself increasingly the centre of renewable energy. Mexico, South Africa and Korea are other examples. All around the world people are encouraging others to invest in order that they may achieve those ends. Therefore, if we want investment here, we have to recognise that we are in a competitive market. I say to my noble friend Lord Teverson that that is the issue concerning greed.
The fact is that if we want the investment and the jobs here, we have to provide the security that enables people to invest. That is why I again say to my noble friend that the very sensible proposal of the Committee on Climate Change that we should have a carbon intensity target for 2030 is essential not for climate change but so that we get the investment for Britain plc. If we want to show people that there is a continuum of support, that it will not drop over the precipice in 2020 and then arrive again in 2050, we have to have some kind of assurance. The beauty of the assurance that we have suggested is that it is not prescriptive. It does not say how we should do it; it merely says that there will be a clear indication that we want decarbonisation of electricity and that the carbon intensity target that we set will have to be reached by whatever means we wish. It might be achieved by advancing CCS, by having more nuclear or by producing more offshore or onshore wind, but we know where we are trying to do it, and we know that we are doing it so that all of us in this country can see the benefits of the investment we are making.
I want to be the first to congratulate the Treasury on producing £7.6 billion of investment to enable us to do that, but if that investment is to do Britain the best that it can, it must encourage people to bring their supply chains into this country and not maintain them elsewhere. It also means that we have to have very clear visibility between now and 2020. My noble friend has promised to let us have this information early. I hope that we will not go for just a year-by-year arrangement. We must know so that people who are making investment decisions now—which will emerge in 2018, for example—know exactly where they are going to be.
Against that background, I suggest that there is another issue which the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London did not refer to but which I know is close to his heart. We are arguing this case in a world that will have 9 billion people. The idea that we will have cheap energy with the pressures of 1.5 billion more middle-class people demanding the sort of lives that we live, or the idea that there is some mysterious and magical world around the corner with cheap gas, seems beyond any sane measurement. Of course we have to use our fracked gas, of course we have to make sure that we use what resources we have, and of course we need carbon capture and storage to make that gas as low in its emissions as possible. At the same time as paying this very small amount to give us insurance against climate change, exactly those same efforts are giving us insurance against ever-higher gas prices. After all, the International Energy Agency has made it clear that gas prices are likely to rise—to double in the United States—over the next 10 years.
It will also give us sovereignty, and I will finish on that point. I do not want my children to be in the hands of Mr Putin’s children. It is a simple matter. If we can create our own energy here, we are not only protecting ourselves against climate change and taking insurance against high gas prices but ensuring that, by having a portfolio of energy resources, we in this country control this crucial element in our future. I therefore congratulate the Government on bringing the Bill forward. It needs one or two tweaks, and I shall be pressing for those tweaks—and I know that many will join me. It is the first time that we have had so far-reaching and far-looking a Bill before this House on a subject that has for far too long been at the bottom of the list of priorities.