Net-Zero Carbon Emissions

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Wednesday 21st April 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I welcome this debate and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Teverson. Given that I will focus on education throughout much of my speech, I remind the Committee of my education interests in the register, particularly relating to my work with Purpose on climate education.

I also welcome yesterday’s government announcement of putting into law the target to cut emissions by 78% by 2035, as recommended by the Climate Change Committee. This morning I read with interest the news of the Mark Carney-led initiative to bring together 160 firms from the global finance sector—including Barclays, HSBC and Axa—with over $70 trillion in assets to meet new targets to cut the carbon content of those assets by 2030. It occurred to me: if the finance sector can come up with a plan, what is the plan for the public sector?

Clearly, we need leadership from central government and, as others have said, this year is a great opportunity. Tomorrow is Biden’s summit; the biodiversity COP is next month in China; the G7 is in Cornwall in June; there is the G20 meeting in Italy; and COP 26 is in November in Glasgow. This is the time to set an aggressive, ambitious course with such a focus on climate change to drive national momentum and public opinion.

The cynic in me, as with others, warns that this is a Government who love an announcement and a Prime Minister who craves the attention and will glory in the UK’s leadership role this year. But do they have a delivery plan to make this happen? Will the Chancellor change the Treasury’s long-standing hostility to green spending and fund a road map to carbon zero? Incidentally, rather than a separate Cabinet Minister for climate change, I would prefer to make the Chancellor accountable for the delivery of climate change plans, as part of a shift of emphasis in the Treasury from money to well-being.

Fundamental to that is investment in local government-led projects to enable place-based change. This is not just about the obvious local authority functions of housing, transport or waste. These are crucial, but we also need to see beyond a transactional approach of investment in X technology to achieve Y reduction in carbon emissions. That will not always deal with the ingrained political problem of there being parts of the population who are not ready for the change.

The importance of a place-based approach is that success is first and foremost about behaviour change in the whole population. We have seen how hard that is through the pandemic. Despite the best efforts of “hands, space, face” as a slogan, and billions in spending, plenty are still struggling to shift their behaviour to make our communities safe from the virus. How then will we get the whole population to change the food we eat, how we move around, how we dress and how we fuel our lives so that they are sustainable and affordable?

I believe that one of the biggest mistakes in the Government’s thinking in their handling of the virus is that they have not sufficiently engaged local government as an ally. Localities are different and need different solutions to create behaviour change. A national approach will always struggle to account for the rich diversity of our nation. Our impoverished councils urgently need more resources to invest in climate change mitigation projects that will effect the behaviour change we need.

The place I would start is in schools and colleges. Almost half of all households in this country contain school-age children. Children and young people are already engaged with this issue. We saw that with the Friday school strikes. According to the OECD, 78% of students in its member countries agree that the global environment is important to them and want to do something about it. The opportunity is to stand alongside those children and young people to shift our behaviour at a household and community level. The majority of schools in this country are still local authority schools, either directly or in partnership with faith groups. There is an urgent need to enable and empower local authorities to take a leadership role on this.

I commend to your Lordships the work of the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. It recently published a powerful analysis by Christina Kwauk and Rebecca Winthrop, which says:

“Recent research shows that if only 16 percent of high school students in high- and middle-income countries were to receive climate change education, we could see a nearly 19 gigaton reduction of carbon dioxide by 2050. When education helps students develop a strong personal connection to climate solutions, as well as a sense of personal agency and empowerment, it can have consequential impact on students’ daily behaviors and decisionmaking that reduces their overall lifetime carbon footprint. Imagine if 100 percent of students in the world received such an education. New evidence also shows that the combination of women’s empowerment and education that includes everyone—especially the 132 million out-of-school girls across the developing world—could result in an 85 gigaton reduction of carbon dioxide by 2050. By these estimates, leveraging the power of education is potentially more powerful than solely increasing investments in onshore wind turbines … or concentrated solar power”.


It goes on to say:

“Emerging research suggests the ‘sweet spot’ for climate action is at the scale of 10,000-100,000 people. This is not only because the collective ability to make meaningful action is rooted in local relevance, but also because we reach a certain degree of cost-benefit optimization when it comes to the global impact of our local actions. If we apply this to the education system, this is equivalent to focusing efforts at the school district level—or the equivalent school administrative cluster, depending on the population size of cities and counties. School districts are the perfect network of institutions that exist in every country in the world that has enough community connection potential to effectively scale green civic learning. Focusing efforts at the local level enables educational interventions to be community-driven, which is aligned to what we know about effective climate action and effective climate change education: that is, it needs to be locally-relevant, tied to local environmental justice issues, tied to local community challenges with climate change, and it needs to be tied to action and ownership at community level.”


Here I commend the work of Ashden’s Let’s Go Zero campaign, which a sixth of county councils are supporting, along with the Anglican Church. So far it has got more than 200 schools to pledge to be carbon zero by 2030. The smart thing about this campaign is not just the carbon impact but the educational one. It aims to get school and college leaders to stand alongside their students and pupils in making this pledge one institution at a time.

It is critical for the behaviour change for this to be owned by the school itself and to have the work to move to zero led by young people. That way, they learn about the consumption of energy and water on the site, the carbon impacts of the food they consume in school, the carbon capture of what they can grow on the estate, and the importance of the choices they make when they travel to and from the school or college. They can then apply that knowledge with the skills they need and, most importantly, develop the carbon-zero mindset we need in the whole population if we are serious about the 2050 net-zero target, let alone the new 2035 one.

This is because, of course, we want schools to reflect the future we want for our communities. That has to be a carbon-zero future. By starting with schools and colleges, we are nurturing the skills and mindsets needed in the labour force as we shift to the sustainable future we all want. Young people need a strong knowledge base in the causes of a warming climate, but also a strong set of skills that will allow them to apply their knowledge in the real world, including problem-solving, critical thinking, teamwork, coping with uncertainty, empathy and negotiation. Indeed, these very transferable skills are needed equally to thrive in the world of work and to be constructive citizens. There is such a win-win to be had here.

In this country, 77% of adults support teaching about climate change in schools and 69% of teachers agree that there should be more teaching on this subject than what is focused on in the non-compulsory subject of geography. My ask, therefore, is for central government to prioritise climate education in schools. Would the Minister like to join me in visiting a school to meet its school council, and to lobby it to make the Let’s Go Zero pledge? The Minister should be inspired by Italy, where every school-age child, by law, must have an hour each week of sustainable citizenship education. Here, we should mandate time, resources and training for teachers in this area, and then work closely with local authorities on the delivery of all our schools becoming carbon zero by 2030.

This is our chance to move on from children and climate strikes to children leading climate action. We can use our leadership position at COP to get others to do the same and, in doing so, drive the behaviour shift across the population that the world needs.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

My Lords, the next two speakers have withdrawn from the debate, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale.