Climate Change: COP 26

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, Alok Sharma deserves very high praise for the many deals and agreements he achieved in important areas such as trees and methane. It is obvious, particularly from the speech we have just heard, that Glasgow was a fountain of fascinating new ideas, all to be developed.

Nevertheless, we are now in fact entering an extremely dangerous phase in which people, especially the young, are being deluded into believing that climate violence and greatly increased volatility in price and supply over the coming era can all somehow be averted or much ameliorated by net-zero policies that will cost little and cause minimum upheaval. This is 100% wrong and utterly misleading. In practice, the enormous world energy transition now being contemplated will cause huge disruption and bring massive social, industrial and political change—like the Industrial Revolution but on a vastly greater scale and costing trillions, not billions.

For a start, there is the sheer and complete impracticality of re-engineering the entire power and electricity systems of India, China, Africa and other countries, closing down and totally replacing their countless coal-fired and other fossil-fuel stations—which my noble friend Lord Tugendhat has just referred to—and transforming, in short order, the complex coal, oil and gas fuel mix that has dominated the world for the past two centuries. Not only can this not be done without intense human suffering or within the alleged timescale but just hand-wringing and promising not to finance any new coal-fired power stations does not begin to touch the rising emissions problem that is sitting before us.

The only way of doing so would be to go out to each one of the thousands of coal-fired stations across Asia and around the world and retrofit them with affordable carbon-capture devices—which, incidentally, are yet to be invented—and modern supercritical boilers. This is possible, but the funds required to do it, including not just the equipment but the technology, training and skilled manpower to do the fitting, exceed by a factor of at least 10 anything now being publicly admitted or any of the sums being talked about.

Actually, if aiding the most vulnerable and defenceless in our societies and easing human suffering were the real and genuine purpose, would we be going this way at all? By far the best use of funds and the most genuinely caring and compassionate route would be massive adaptation to protect people better against the inevitable periods ahead—who knows for how long —of climate violence, floods, storms, fires and heat waves, which are, historically, now due anyway.

Although, as we have been reminded, we should care deeply for the small island states, this is a direct threat to our own islands, as the noble Baroness, Lady Young, quite rightly began this debate by reminding us. We should tackle the protection and adaptation task with the intensity that the Dutch showed five centuries ago, only now at 100 times the scale.

The management of this transition, phase by phase, will require the utmost skill and intricate strategic energy planning. Without this and proper back-up, we will run into terrible price spikes, causing intense hardship for the most vulnerable and the defenceless, just as we are doing at this moment, although we do not seem to have touched on it much in this debate. Of course, it will also cause real insecurity and power shortages. We can have as many conferences as we like, but it is time for some honesty, realism and real action to prepare and protect our environment, our energy security and the younger generations’ real interests, prosperity and safety.