Climate

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd April 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

I congratulate the noble Baroness on securing this debate and on her introduction to it.

Since the Industrial Revolution, the average temperature of the Earth has warmed by an average of nearly one degree centigrade, and it is all the better for that. From the physics I studied at Cambridge, I am convinced that a part of that at least is attributable to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases being emitted into the atmosphere, and that if we continue to burn fossil fuels, the temperature of the world—other things being equal—will continue to rise. We have to decide at what point the benefits of warming are exceeded by the costs, and whether those costs constitute an emergency.

According to the BBC website—we know we can trust the BBC, because it is so unconfident of its position that it will not allow anyone else to broadcast it—the principal danger threatening us as a result of rising temperatures is a rise in the sea levels as a result of melting ice caps. Certainly, if the ice caps melt it would raise sea levels by over 30 metres, which would, as the BBC adds, submerge many low-lying cities. However, the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that it will take millennia for the ice caps to melt even if we continue using fossil fuels at a high and unabated rate. I cannot help feeling that, at least in the next centuries, we may harness fusion and have limitless energy, enabling us to cope with these problems or find other ways of solving them. They certainly do not constitute an emergency.

The BBC goes on to list other disasters which could be more imminent, such as flooding, droughts, storms and declining crop yields. All these things happen already. They may or may not be becoming more frequent but what is undoubtedly true is that fatalities from any of these events have been declining rapidly decade by decade. In developed countries such as ours, the risk of dying from any such natural event has declined dramatically and is extremely unlikely. It is most unlikely that any of us will suffer loss of life or even major damage to our property as a result of these things.

If we lived in developing countries it would be different; they are at far greater risk. People in poor countries are vulnerable to climate disasters because they are poor—and they are poor because they have not yet harnessed energy in the same way as we have to improve their living standards, their infrastructure and their environment. If we prevent them using cheap fossil fuels to develop, they will remain poor longer and exposed to these emergencies, these threats, these risks. That is what we threaten to do.

What we do in this country is negligible. If we stopped using fossil fuels and stopped eating meat tomorrow, that would reduce the total emissions in the world by 2%, less than one year’s growth in China. If we are to treat this as an emergency, we are talking about keeping poor people poor by stopping them using cheap energy. That is not worthwhile because it exposes them to emergencies. The real emergency, the real crisis, would be in developing countries if we were to follow the logic of the noble Baroness’s position and keep them in the undeveloped state in which not using fossil fuels and not making emissions would leave them.