Climate Change: COP 26

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, like a number of other Members of your Lordships’ House, I went up to Glasgow to COP. I went as chairman of the Cumbria local enterprise partnership. When I was there, there was a lot of discussion about whether it was going to succeed. Having thought about it, I do not think that is really the right question.

COP is not an isolated event but part of a process of responding to the threat to earth and all of us posed by the sun, the wider solar system and the universe behaving rather like classical deities or Old Testament Jehovah because we have messed up the protective atmospheric shield around us. Indeed, it has some similarities to attacks on the earth by aliens so beloved by science fiction writers. Rather to my surprise, when I pulled the China Daily out of my pigeonhole I saw the headline “End of Life a Real Risk if Climate Crisis is Unresolved”.

Although it is frustrating, success is not attributable to the communiqué issued at the end of the proceedings. I share the frustration of Alok Sharma and the Government about that. In a world where, honestly and realistically, we cannot necessarily rely confidently on people doing what they say and Governments sticking by what they have signed up to, and where political measures are perhaps the strongest sanction against recidivists, we are in a tricky place.

Much of the debate internationally seems to echo the debate I have had about climate change in Cumbria, where various discussions vie with plans, each more ambitious, grandiloquent and dramatic than the last. What matters, though, is the speed and thoroughness of dealing with the real issues, not the superficial grandeur and ambition of the plans.

We all have a part to play. In the case of my local enterprise partnership, we are promoting clean energy generation, particularly through nuclear and offshore wind. We are emphasising decarbonisation, both of business itself and of the transport systems and networks serving it. We are promoting and trying to activate natural carbon capture, which cannot work properly unless there is proper financial recognition for those deploying and managing the assets. Finally—this has not yet been mentioned—we are recognising and pursuing the commercial opportunities that the low-carbon economy presents to business.

We often face criticism: “We’ll behave properly but the rest of the world cheats, so what’s the point?”. The point is that we all have to do this together, because otherwise we will all be doomed. We in this country should show solidarity and leadership and get buy-in from everybody where we can. I believe we should proceed with developing some kind of Marshall aid to help many countries much poorer than us that face real, immediate challenges. It is true that we exported pollution from our country to many of their countries to enrich ourselves.

I come back to the critical question I started with: has it succeeded? I do not know—certainly not completely and absolutely in itself. But if COP 26 is a real move, a staging post to achieving in time the necessary changes to recalibrate how we all behave on earth and towards the earth, it certainly cannot have been a failure.