Climate Change

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Monday 24th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, for giving us the chance to have this debate. I very much enjoyed the speech of the noble Earl, Lord Russell, as I did many of his father’s speeches. I look forward to plenty of future iterations.

I approach this debate in a positive frame of mind. I look at the national adaptation programme and think, “Yeah, that’s a good start”—but I shall not be short of ideas of how to do even better. I share my noble friend Lord Frost’s preference for adaptation. It is something we can do. We can get this done ourselves and look after ourselves. We do not have to fret about what the rest of the world is doing as we do with amelioration, where all our efforts would be wasted if they do not come up to scratch. With adaptation, we can absolutely look after ourselves. It ought to be the focus. I share my noble friend Lord Deben’s wish that that focus should immediately be on water. I declare an interest as a resident of the south-east. This is something we can do.

There is no UK shortage of water, but it is a big project; it is something where there needs to be a fair degree of consensus between all sides of politics on what we should do. It is something we should be actively trying to get on with, because the problems are with us now and will, we expect, get considerably worse. Of course, it might be that the Gulf Stream stops and we all get cold, but I think we should not bet on that.

There are some things we can do that we can all agree are worthwhile, whatever the circumstances. We should be putting extra money into crop genetics. We know that we will need to change the crops we grow; we know that will we need them to deal with different climate, whatever else happens. We really ought not be so dependent on varieties of grass. We are not in a resilient situation and we have the skills in this country to do a great deal better. We ought, as the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, said, to major on disease surveillance; we ought to know what is going on.

As my noble friend will discover when we get back to LURB, we ought to be doing stuff on local solar: solar on roofs, particularly industrial roofs, is just a total no-brainer. Solar and cooling go together, like love and marriage, and we are not doing enough to make that possible at the moment. The other thing we need to major on is truthfulness. I have been very impressed by noble Lords from all sides today, and much less so by the BBC in its garish reporting of dubious statistics on temperatures here and abroad.

We also ought to be looking at long-timescale things: restoration and renewal should remind us that this is committing us to defend London for one or two centuries. We ought to agree how we will do that, and where the barrier will be. What will be the technology? If we take those long-term decisions now, we shall build infrastructure that fits with the future, rather than stuff that will get washed away in the next flood.