COP 27: Commitments

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I thank my noble and right reverend friend Lord Harries for introducing this topic, and we have had a great maiden speech from the noble Lord, Lord Leong, whom I congratulate.

Let me start with a contrast to the proposition made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, about hope and optimism. I am going to talk about disappointment or despair, but not cynicism. Sharm el-Sheikh was a complete failure. The whole process by which we think we are going to achieve 1.5 or 2.4 or whatever degrees by international or inter-governmental negotiations—45,000 people turned up at Sharm el-Sheikh—is a delusion. Many people are very idealistic, and I respect their idealism; they sincerely believe they know what has to be done, and they hope that their Governments will agree to these sorts of steps. The Governments are all cynics, of course; they say yes at the conference, then go home and do something entirely different. We have had this proposition that somehow the globe is one. We saw a picture of the earth from space, and we suddenly got the delusion that the globe is one and that therefore our interests are identical, but our interests are not identical—certainly not as represented by Governments.

Sixty years ago, I got to America from India and the most popular book was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which argued that the use of insecticides kills birds, and that this was the first signal that we were doing things that were against our own nature. Early in the 1970s, there was a conference in Stockholm on climate change with a slogan: “One week to save the world”. That was in 1971. Fifty years later, we are still trying to save the world. It is quite clear that we live in a system not of identity of global interests, but of power relations, where powerful countries do what they want, as they want and when they want. We saw that at Glasgow. In Glasgow, poor Alok Sharma was practically in tears because he could not convince India and China to agree to the coal target.

The same thing happens again and again. At Sharm el-Sheikh, everybody says, “Oh, there has been a fund created”. That fund has a quarter of 1% of the original planned fund—£250 million. The original planned fund was in billions, so this is pin money. It is not seriously going to compensate anybody for anything, but it salves the consciences of the various parties who are there. The world ought to really ask whether there is not a better process for doing these negotiations and making these decisions, because it reminds me of the worst kind of things done in the United Nations. The United Nations has a General Assembly. Whatever the General Assembly does, it does not matter a hoot because the five permanent members decide what the UN will do, and the five permanent members do not obey anything decided by the UNGA. We live in a very unequal society and therefore it is no good pretending that somehow the next conference, or the conference after next, will arrive at a decision which we will all agree to and heaven on earth will descend.

We have to hope that we can achieve better results on the carbon front within the UK, and the noble Lord, Lord Birt, and various other speakers have already detailed what we can do to clean up our environment, whatever anybody else may do. That at least can be done.

I welcome the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Leong, that, ultimately, we will have to rely on enterprise and innovation, which will come from the private sector and not from anywhere else, to find alternatives and better ways of doing the things we do so badly now. I do not know what they are because I am not technologically literate, but during my lifetime on a number of other fronts, such as communications, telephones, digital technology and so on, things have happened which have considerably simplified the world. They all happened because people wanted to profit. They will not happen for any idealistic reasons; they will happen for profit. Going along that path, I hope that we will get some solution. It will not come from any number of meetings of any number of countries, anywhere. In business, solutions pay for themselves. This would be paid for by taxpayers.

En passant, I ask: who decided to meet in Egypt? Why do we go and meet in the worst dictatorships going? We are going to the UAE. Why do we not just have every conference denouncing fossil fuel in Saudi Arabia, so at least we know we will not get anywhere? We will all have a fun time going there, but at least we will know that the outcome will be hostile to whatever we want to do.

However, at some stage we will have to find ways of making international decisions where global problems are involved in a way other than what we have constructed from the Rio conference onwards to many other international meetings, also attended by NGOs and very idealistic people, who all have to be disappointed. There are urgent tasks that need to be fulfilled. For example, who will look after the people who will face rising sea levels and will be made homeless? Do we have any plan to move those people away to safer countryside? That will be an urgent problem because people will drown if we do not do something like that.

We ought, at least privately, on our own as the UK, to try to think of some of those problems and see what we as a single country, and as one of the P5, G7, or whatever we are, can do. We are an important player in this context. We as a country ought to think through on our own what the urgent problems are so that we can solve the world’s problems, regardless of what the rest of the world does. I hope the Government will take on that task along the lines suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Birt, and I hope we get somewhere.