Climate Agenda

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend Lord Lilley for giving us the opportunity of this debate and it was a great privilege to listen to the maiden speech of my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead. I note that she had the prescience, having started her life at sea level in Eastbourne, where I live, to move up to the hills of Maidenhead, thereby ensuring that, whatever happens with global warming, she will be okay.

One advantage of this place is that we listen to people we disagree with and very often we learn from them. I listened to the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan of Chelsea, and I disagreed with much of what he said, although I did agree with him on the precautionary principle. The precautionary principle and, indeed, actuaries have made a huge mess of our pensions system, resulting in a stock market with annual outflows rather than inflows, greatly weakening our economy. I very much hope this Government will do something about that. When I was the Lords spokesman for the Ministry of Agriculture and BSE hit, the first reaction of the precautionary principle people was, “We must kill every cow in the country”. Fortunately, we took wider considerations into account—so one does learn from people one finds oneself in opposition to.

We are dealing with a science-based question. Science at its best is a retailer of truthful, beautiful, digestible stories, based on clear metrics, evidence for what works, a real interest in getting at the gaps in the evidence and constant evaluation. I think we are in much that position when it comes to climate change. There is a huge amount of work going in to trying to understand how our climate works. It is a very public body of work. I personally would like to see more red-teaming. I bristle when I hear about scientific consensus. Science is not about consensus; it is about disagreement and challenge. By and large, we have done a pretty good job on that. Where I think we have failed is on net zero. We have not produced the stories, the understanding—what my noble friend Lord Randall called “taking the public with us”. When even the national grid does not know what is expected of it in five years’ time, we are not being open about what lies in front of us—we are not taking people with us.

If we are going to make the best possible and best co-ordinated decisions, we need to really understand where we think we are going to get our power from and what its characteristics, price and availability will be. We are not dealing with little bits here; we are dealing with a whole system and economy and we need to understand how all the bits will work together. And this is not a story which will remain static. We are a long way away from 2050. How we think we are going to get there will change every year, but we need to be telling that story openly and I really hope that that is something the Government will set their mind to.

To pick on three smaller, more particular issues, one of the characteristics of net zero is that carbon will become really valuable. We will not have access to the fossil sources that we have relied on. If we are to run a chemical industry, produce jet fuel, or whatever it is we do, we need to find carbon where it is concentrated. We really ought to make an audit of where those carbon sources are, because a lot of what we now regard as waste will actually be a really valuable resource in 25 years’ time. We ought to build the systems to make access to that resource possible.

Secondly, nuclear clearly has some very good characteristics when it comes to powering those parts of the economy that need guaranteed, continuous power—a data centre is the obvious example, which is why Google has gone in that direction. I really hope that the Government, as they are with housing, will take a pair of shears to the regulations, which grew up over decades of excessive anxiety about the safety of nuclear, and look at giving us sites, chasing multiple technologies for modular nuclear reactors, and dealing with idiocies such as the prohibition on burning the nuclear waste at Sellafield. Why do we have to keep it when some varieties of modern nuclear reactor will use it as fuel?

Thirdly, let us look generally at where the technological pinch points are. What are we finding difficult that ought to be possible because it is allowed by the basic laws of science, but we cannot quite get there? Battery technology is an obvious example, but there are many others. We should make sure we put money into research, because if we can get an early lead there, it will turn into big industries.