Lord Lilley
Main Page: Lord Lilley (Conservative - Life peer)UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
Lord Lilley Excerpts(11 years, 8 months ago)
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Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)
It is a great pleasure to participate in this debate under your chairmanship, Mr Turner. Like the Chair of the Energy and Climate Change Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk (Mr Yeo), I must draw the Chamber’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests—not that I am aware of any way in which the outcome of this debate or the issues raised in it could affect my well-being through those interests.
I admit that I was not a member of the Select Committee when it drew up the two reports that we are considering, so I cannot claim credit for them or share in any blame. I put myself forward for the Committee precisely because I was concerned about the rather over-cosy relationship between it and the Government, which has allowed them both, and the whole intellectual establishment in this country, to live in a dream world on energy and climate change issues. Mercifully, through the operation of a secret ballot, I was elected to the Committee.
Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. One of the early signs of madness is an indulgence in compulsive displacement activity, which could not be a better description of the whole COP process. Tens of thousands of people are displaced across the globe to an environment where they are cut off from reality and the rest of the world, where they can indulge themselves in demonstrating their lack of realism and reality, and where the original objective of obtaining a legally binding agreement between nations to reduce worldwide emissions has itself been displaced by the alternative objective of reaching an agreement to meet again—and to agree to reach an agreement at some distant future time. That is displacement activity on a massive scale, and it involves a massive degree of hypocrisy, given the huge emissions incurred by these eco-warriors as they swan across the globe in jets and hire fleets of limousines, so emitting more CO2 than a small African country.
The aim of displacement activity is of course to avoid facing up to reality, so I will just point out a few facts that have not found their way into the report or into discussions of such matters, but seem to me to be rather pertinent. The original aim of the Kyoto protocol and the agreement in 1992 was to reduce emissions by the contracting parties by 5% by now—or by last year—but world emissions have actually gone up by nearer 50%. By happy chance, the rise in the world temperature over that period was much less than anticipated, despite the fact that the supposed cause of that rise in temperature was even greater and more powerful than anticipated.
Since the Kyoto agreement was signed, Canada, Japan and Russia have resiled from it. Far from making progress in getting countries to sign up, we have lost three very important world players. The US will not sign up to Kyoto or its successor, or to any legally binding agreement, as long as developing countries are allowed to continue to increase their emissions unconstrained. It was not President Bush who prevented America signing up, but the Senate. Senators refused to sign up to Kyoto by 98 votes to zero.
That situation has not changed since President Obama’s election: there is no chance of America signing up to legally binding restraints on its emissions as long as developing countries are not also bound by them. But the developing countries want to grow, and I want them to grow. I do not like seeing hundreds of millions of my fellow human beings wallowing in misery and living lives that are stunted relative to what their material living standards might be if they achieved economic growth. But growth requires energy—it is almost synonymous with the rise in the use of energy—and the growth in energy use needed to raise their living standards will absorb much of their capacity to invest and much of the capital available for them to invest in future decades.
Fossil fuels are the cheapest form of energy. Renewables cost two or more times as much as fossil fuels to produce a given amount of energy. If developing countries were forced to use renewables, they could only afford less than half as much energy as they would otherwise be able to bring on stream. That means they will not use renewables; they will continue to develop by exploiting the use of fossil fuels.
Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)
I do not know whether the right hon. Gentleman has had the chance to go to any developing countries, but I had the opportunity to go to Tanzania last year and saw for myself at first hand how communities, which do not have access to any gas or electricity on grid, were successfully harnessing the power of the sun via solar panels to provide whole villages with energy.
Mr Lilley
The hon. Lady may seriously believe in the use of renewables in places where it is sensible to use them. If an area is a long way from the grid, it may be sensible to use a windmill or a solar panel, even though it will not provide light at night or electricity when the wind is not blowing.
Mr Lilley
If my right hon. Friend the Minister thinks that it is economic at present to store electricity in batteries, he is living in a dream world. That means that it will be not two times as expensive, as is the case with wind, or eight times as expensive, as is the case with solar, but more like 20 times as expensive if it is stored in batteries. If someone could develop storage for renewables, that would be wonderful; I would be grateful to him and he would be a great benefactor to humanity. However, I do not think that my right hon. Friend knows of such an invention.
Gregory Barker
My right hon. Friend is comparing two completely different things. He is talking about industrial-scale storage. As the hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger) said, the reality in the developing world is that most people require very small amounts of energy. Typically, they need it to use a laptop, a phone and possibly a refrigerator. Battery storage is not only viable, but happening at scale. There are nearly 500 million people in India off the grid, and hundreds of millions of people in Africa.
Mr Andrew Turner (in the Chair)
Order. I have two points. First, the intervention was too long. Secondly, Mr Lilley needs to bring his remarks closer to the subject.
Mr Lilley
I am merely explaining why the COP process is completely ridiculous and will not result in any agreement. We have this unrealistic agreement between the two Front-Bench speakers that the matter will be solved by installing a few wind turbines and solar panels in villages in Tanzania. India and China, in which effectively half the world’s population live, are industrialising. They are industrialising not by building a few windmills and solar panels, but by building nuclear—sometimes, but that is very expensive—coal above all and gas where they have it. Of course they will sometimes use renewables where it is appropriate and where an area is a long way from the grid, but let us not kid ourselves that because we have seen one windmill in Africa, the whole developing world will develop by means of renewables. If the two Front-Bench speakers, who are united in their lunacy, would like to tell me that that is seriously their belief and that they think the developing countries will grow primarily by harnessing renewables, I will give way to them.
Mr Andrew Turner (in the Chair)
Mr Lilley, it is your choice as to who is to speak. Who do you wish to speak?
Gregory Barker
I thank my right hon. Friend. The key point here is that we are not comparing shale gas in America with the opportunity for development in the developing world. We are comparing the marginal cost of a diesel generator for hundreds of millions of people in the developing world with a renewable alternative. In most cases, it is viable without any form of subsidy.
David Mowat
I just wanted to put my tuppence-worth into the example from Tanzania. If that were the way forward at scale, China would not be building 50 unabated coal stations every year. That is what is happening, but it does not mean that solar power cannot power laptops in Tanzania. The proof is in the pudding. I want to go back to the remarks made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley). Where does he see nuclear?
Mr Lilley
I am grateful to hear that there is another voice of common sense in this Chamber. Where do I see nuclear? Unfortunately, it has become extremely expensive but it is, none the less, a source of major power that is not dependent on the vagaries of the weather or the fact that the sun goes in at night.
Dr Whitehead
For completeness, will the right hon. Gentleman put on the record the extent to which he accepts any externalities in the extraction, transportation and use of fossil fuels, or does he think that they could be made even cheaper by having 12-year-olds dig them out of the ground with no safety rules whatever, no transportation and no concerns? What are his particular parameters in terms of the comparisons he is making?
Mr Andrew Turner (in the Chair)
Order. I am sorry but we must have brief interventions. That will get us back on to a swifter speech.
Mr Lilley
I do not know why the hon. Gentleman raises the issue of 12-year-olds being employed in any particular industry; I am not in favour of that. Do I accept that there are externalities involved in the activities? Yes I do, and, for the sake of argument, I will accept all the externalities that are attributed to CO2. I am simply pointing to the reality that India and China, with half the population of the world, Africa, with a further major share of the world, and Latin America are going to develop by harnessing fossil fuels. We will not prevent them from doing so unless we ourselves are prepared to subsidise the difference between fossil fuels and the cost of renewable alternatives.
Mr Lilley
I will do so in a moment. I do not believe that this country, or Europe as a whole, can afford simultaneously to bear the costs of cutting its own emissions by 80% and the cost of the developing world’s developing at the speed and pace they want to while we absorb the additional costs we would force them to incur if they did so using renewables instead of fossil fuels. It just will not happen. It cannot happen, and the Government would not get re-elected if they proposed to the British electorate that we should incur that burden.
Sir Malcolm Bruce
May I suggest that the right hon. Gentleman is advancing a false prospectus? No one is suggesting that developing countries should not use fossil fuels. We are saying that they should use a sensible mix, and be encouraged to have access to renewables. That is why, for example, Ethiopia is building dams to generate hydroelectric power and China has a huge investment programme in renewable energy. They know that they have a mix. The right hon. Gentleman seems to be arguing that there should be no mix.
Mr Lilley
The Chinese, whom we will come on to in the next debate, are planning to produce, by 2030, 11% of their energy from renewables. The bulk of it will be hydroelectric, which is a conventional source of electricity; no one would argue against that. Where countries have hydro power and they can harness it, they should go ahead and do so. That has always been happening and it will happen anyway. It is happening regardless of whether CO2 is a serious problem for them. Hon. Members must recognise that the world is developing using fossil fuels. We can wish that that was not the case. We can finance great jamborees every year or two. We can all get together and pretend to ignore it, but as long as those in the developing world are free to exploit fossil fuels and any renewables they find economic or choose to inflict on themselves, America will not sign up either. If America, China, India, Canada, Russia and Japan will not sign up, it seems slightly perverse of us to assume that by gathering together we are somehow going to overcome that resistance; we will not.
Mr Yeo
For the sake of accuracy—I may have misheard my right hon. Friend—let me say that the target in China is for 11.4% of its energy mix to come from non-fossil sources by 2015. That is in less than three years from now. I might have misheard my right hon. Friend, but I think that he mentioned a later date. May I also put on record that China’s explicit goal is to reduce substantially the use of coal as a proportion of its total energy mix over the next two decades, and it is already the world’s largest investor in renewable energy sources?
Mr Lilley
I take all those points, and I probably did give the wrong date for the Chinese. However, I remember also seeing their figure for further ahead, which was not much higher. There would be a large increase in the amount of renewables, but not in the percentage of renewables, and still the vast bulk of their energy will come from conventional sources.
We can make ourselves feel better by bigging up in our mind the amount of renewables and by getting warm feelings about the sight of solar panels bringing light to small villages in isolated parts of Africa. However, if we seriously imagine that these great jamborees will result in an agreement by the countries in the developing world to constrain significantly their ability to grow by constraining their ability to use fossil fuels, we are living in a dream world, and everything that has happened in this debate suggests that the majority of Members present for it are part of that dream.
David Mowat
I will make a quick intervention to point out that we are saying that fossil fuel usage is a developing world phenomenon—it is not. The EU is increasing its use of coal. Last year, the increase of coal use in the EU was significant. For example, it is one of the reasons why Germany has much higher carbon usage than we do, both per head and per unit of GDP.
Mr Lilley
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Of course, Germany is moving away from renewables, if one counts nuclear as a renewable. It is moving away from nuclear. It is planning to close down all its nuclear plants, and by and large that will mean replacing them with fossil fuel plants instead. [Interruption.] Does the hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead) want to intervene?
Dr Whitehead
I was just pointing out that the right hon. Gentleman said that nuclear is a renewable. I recall the process of getting uranium out of the ground in order to fuel nuclear reactors, and once it is out of the ground it cannot be put back in again. Nuclear is not a renewable.
Mr Lilley
Okay. I take the hon. Gentleman’s pedantry in good heart, since I am a pedant myself. I should not have said “renewable”; I should have said “non-fossil fuel”. Nevertheless, Germany is moving away from its dependence on nuclear, which is a non-fossil fuel, and it will rely more on fossil fuels, despite its already large commitment to solar and wind.
At this point, Mr Turner, to avoid yet more interventions, which might incur your wrath, and further replies to them from me, which might be too long, I will leave Westminster Hall to those who wish to indulge their fantasies in public, so that they can have their say.
Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)
Mr Turner, it is a great pleasure to speak in this debate under your chairmanship. I should declare my interests, such as they are. They are non-pecuniary, but I am the chairman of the board of GLOBE International, which has already been referenced in this debate.
There is one thing at least on which I agree with the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley), and that is that those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. I wonder whether he would agree with me on another epithet, or epigram: just as the stone age did not end because of a lack of stone, so the oil age will not end because of a shortage of oil. But while we have many fossil fuel resources left in the world that we are able to mine and access, and which countries are seeking ever more to discover the resources to dig or pump up and use, none the less there will be a time, I think, when we realise that the effects of doing so are such that we have to desist.
I will focus my remarks more clearly on the UNFCCC itself and the process of the UNFCCC. I begin by outlining why a change in climate should matter at all. The UNFCCC is the United Nations framework convention on climate change and the world has occupied itself with this problem of climate change for a very long time now; why should we? It is certainly the most complex and intractable question of justice that the world has ever seen, in that it is not simply about justice between peoples separated by geography and wealth, but about justice between peoples separated in time, across the generations. It has proved a singularly intractable problem to reconcile those competing interests.
Why does a change in climate matter? In and of itself it should not, were it not for the fact that species—biodiversity—find it difficult to keep pace with the rate of climate change. What we have seen is a change in the rate of extinctions in the modern era that has gathered pace to such an extent that we now have, in comparison with the fossil record, a 1,000% increase in the rate of extinctions. That is higher than in any other period in the whole of the fossil record. We are living in the midst of that, and sometimes when living in the midst of things it is difficult to see the wood for the trees; but that is what is going on. The rate of extinctions that we are experiencing is really quite remarkable.
Mr Lilley
Does the hon. Gentleman recognise that although extinctions are taking place, particularly localised extinctions, they are almost exclusively due to change in habitat as a result of economic development, not as a result of change in temperature? I believe that only one species is known to have been rendered extinct by a change in temperature.
Barry Gardiner
No, I do not accept that at all—not at all—because if the right hon. Gentleman looks at marine life in the oceans, he will see what is happening in tropical coral reefs because of the changes in temperature in the oceans. Whole ecosystems are quite simply being destroyed by the changes in temperature in the oceans.
Mr Lilley
The hon. Gentleman said that we were living through the biggest extinction since perhaps the Palaeozoic era, and he implied that that was through climate change, but he has been unable to cite a single species that has been rendered extinct through climate change. I invite him to do so, or to give me a source where I could find that information.
Luciana Berger
I thank my hon. Friend for giving way. I was able to do some research on my iPad during those interventions, and I was able to identify just one such species—the Ecuadorian harlequin frog.
Luciana Berger
Forgive me. Well, I just found that first one; I will endeavour to find some more species during the course of our debate. That was the first one that came up in my Google search.
Luciana Berger
We were, proudly, the first country in the world to do that, when we passed the Climate Change Act 2008, with a view to reducing our emissions by 2015 in relation to 1990 levels. The Act is held in high regard in countries that I have visited, but legislation is not enough if it is not acted on and if the Government’s actions do not match it. That is why it is important that the Government do all they can to live up to their ambition to be the greenest Government ever, and not slip behind. Then they would be held in high esteem on the international stage.
Mr Lilley
The hon. Lady’s party has abandoned unilateralism in nuclear weapons on the ground that setting an example would not stop other countries following a policy of obtaining nuclear weapons, so why does she favour unilateralism in this sphere and argue that inflicting pain and damage on the British economy will encourage other countries to do likewise?
Luciana Berger
We were the first country to introduce a climate change Act, but other countries, such as Mexico, have followed suit, and many others are considering how to reduce their carbon emissions. I agree with the Chancellor’s comments back in 2007, when he said that investment in low carbon could go hand in hand with growth and support our economy. We have seen global trade in low carbon surpass growth in all other fields. Without domestic investment in low carbon in the UK, our national growth figures last year would have been much worse. I believe the two go hand in hand.
What should the Government do? First, they should back the cross-party amendment proposed by the Chair of the Select Committee and my hon. Friend the Member for Brent North, which would put an explicit target for decarbonising the UK energy sector by 2030 in the Energy Bill. That would give businesses the confidence and certainty they are crying out for to invest in low-carbon and renewable generation, and would signal to other nations that we were serious about meeting our climate change targets and moving to a low-carbon economy.
Secondly, the Prime Minister should get a grip on his MEPs and force them to vote in the European Parliament in accordance with the UK Government’s position. That is the only way to regain our lost credibility in the eyes of our EU neighbours. Thirdly, the UK should renew its role as an international political leader on climate change.
Gregory Barker
There is certainly a strong correlation between regulatory certainty and investor certainty, and lower cost of capital and the flowing of funds into those high-growth sectors. However, another canard that I have to shoot down is the idea that we live in an era of cheap fossil fuels and expensive renewables. Certainly, in the developing world, that is not true. I simply draw the attention of my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden to the fact that, between 2011 and 2014, India will spend $14.267 billion subsidising kerosene, LPG and natural gas. That is one of the largest elements in its national budget; it is largely responsible for the massive calls for structural reform in India, and it is seen as a brake on growth, because the country is subsidising not renewables, but fossil fuels. It is simply wrong to argue anything other, but nor is it an either/or choice.
Mr Lilley
The Minister is making an ineffective debating point. The Indians want their consumers to have cheap fuel at the point of purchase. That may be a misguided policy; it would not be one of the British Government’s, but they choose to subsidise the products that are already the cheapest, not those that are initially the most expensive. If wind and sun were cheaper, perhaps they would subsidise them, but the Minister cannot really pretend that wind is therefore cheaper, because they are subsidising other things.
Gregory Barker
No, but my right hon. Friend will know that last year, the wholesale cost of gas rose by 35%. The cost of renewables is consistently coming down. He will know that the cost of solar crashed in the past two years, and that in many cases, with high irradiation, such as in the developing world—
Gregory Barker
No, I am not. I am responding to my right hon. Friend’s point. The cost of fossil fuels in the developing world in the past two years has largely increased—in some cases, very substantially. The cost of renewables is coming down. That is why India has launched its national solar mission and why it is investing in wind. It is using the subsidy not simply to subsidise consumers for a product that they cannot afford, but as an investment to bring down the cost to the point that they can afford it. When the counterfactual is distributed diesel generators, often no subsidy at all is needed.
Small-scale generation is not some piffling irrelevance, as my right hon. Friend seemed to imply, but it is the reality for hundreds of millions of people in the developing world. Hundreds of millions in Africa and about 400 million in India do not have access to the grid and are not likely to get it any time soon. That is not just an economic imperative; it is a moral one as well. They are not sitting there wanting American-style fridge-freezers and huge cars; for them, a luxury is a light at night or a laptop, so that their kids can have an education or the most rudimentary internet access.
My right hon. Friend seems to think that the American economic model for shale gas is easily replicable in the rest of the world. It is not. If there is cheap gas to be had, we want it here, but it is not a binary world of black and white choices between renewables and fossil fuels.
Mr Lilley
I am overwhelmed by my right hon. Friend’s eloquence and verbosity. If he is saying that renewables are more economic than fossil fuels, that is wonderful—let us leave it to the market, and they will be adopted—but he cannot simultaneously say that we ought to be subsidising them and that they are already as cheap as or cheaper than fossil fuels.
Gregory Barker
Let me explain it one more time. Fossil fuels have been around for centuries. They have had plenty of time to develop, as I think my right hon. Friend will agree. I think that he may have worked, as I have, in the oil and gas industry before coming into politics. The fact is that continuing to supply oil and gas, LPG, petroleum and kerosene at scale to the Indian population requires a structural subsidy. We are not proposing a structural subsidy for renewables; subsidy is justifiable only in any circumstance if there is a chance of getting to a non-subsidised point. We should not subsidise any technology, whether renewable or fossil fuel, if all we are doing is pouring good money after bad. Subsidy for renewables can only be a short-term or at best a medium-term strategy.