Environment: Low-carbon Technologies

Lord Prescott Excerpts

Wednesday 14th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Prescott]

My Lords, first, may I express appreciation for the very warm reception given to me by noble Lords here in this debate and in the House? It is quite different from the House of Commons, I might comment. I have no interest to declare, except to declare the political interest of pursuing social justice and, indeed, global solutions to global problems. I am therefore most pleased to have another parliamentary Chamber in order to make that case and I look forward to doing so, no longer as the Member of Parliament for my constituency in Hull but as a Lord of Hull—not pronounced with the big H—a very proud city, full of Yorkshire people. I am delighted to find another opportunity to represent their case.

It will come as a surprise to some to know that I am related to others of this House. A person of my family served this House with distinction: a Member known to some of your Lordships as Lord Bancroft. I have discovered only quite recently that I am related to him. In fact, we share the same great-great-grandfather, a Welsh miner in the 1830s. Lord Bancroft became the secretary to the Cabinet and the head of the Civil Service, but was removed by Prime Minister Thatcher because he was not prepared to change the Civil Service. That just shows it is in our genes. Lord Bancroft was the Permanent Secretary to the Department of the Environment in 1977. Twenty years later, I had the honour to become the Secretary of State of that department and, as has been referred to, the European Union negotiator for the successful Kyoto agreement on climate change.

I welcome having this opportunity for my maiden speech and I congratulate my noble friend Lord Haskel on this debate. It is a timely and important debate, as I am sure the speeches will show, but I want to reserve my comments to the consequences of climate change, because it is important to get a global solution to that global problem. Unless we can solve the output of carbon, either at the national level or globally, we will inevitably be affected by the result. I shall address my remarks in this limited time to securing a Kyoto 2 agreement at the coming conference in Cancun in Mexico, in December this year. I do so from my experience as a Kyoto negotiator and as the present Council of Europe rapporteur on climate change. I attended the recent Copenhagen conference and will be attending the Cancun conference in December. I have, in the past two months, visited China a number of times to discuss the issues of climate change.

Copenhagen was not a success. Expectations for it were too high, especially in hoping for an internationally agreed and legally enforceable agreement. I said at the time that it was not possible to get that. My colleagues in the previous Government believed that we could, which contributed to the failure of Copenhagen. Kyoto’s legally enforceable agreement applied to only 47 developed countries; in Kyoto 2, we are now dealing with 187 developed and developing countries—a much more difficult problem. Moreover, the Kyoto agreement took four years to negotiate and finalise while at Copenhagen, because a few leaders arrived, it was expected that it would be done in four weeks. As we soon showed, that was not possible.

However, Copenhagen accepted the climate change science—that is now readily accepted—the need to reduce carbon outputs and limit the global temperature increase to 2 degrees centigrade by 2050, and to provide sufficient funds for developing countries to invest in low-carbon economic growth. Yet an international, legally enforceable agreement could not be agreed. That was not only opposed by China, India and most of the developing countries but could not be implemented even by America or China, so in those circumstances it really was not possible.

A continuing difficulty at those Copenhagen negotiations was that they were not able to establish proper criteria for carbon targets. The mood at Copenhagen was soured by the Americans claiming that as China and the US had the same absolute output of carbon, the cutbacks should be the same. That totally ignored any concepts of population and fairness being taken into account; namely, that the measures should be per capita, per person in order to be fairly accepted there. It also needed to be embodied in the concept of the UN principle governing a global solution, that of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.

Bearing in mind the prediction in the excellent work done by the noble Lord, Lord Stern, for the previous Government—it has had a tremendous effect on thinking on climate change and is much to his credit as a Member of the House—when we take into account that the world economy will have grown to be three or four times larger by 2050, while emissions will have to be kept to a quarter of the level they are today. That is a staggering conclusion when we are talking about the efforts to be made to reduce the amount of carbon. Therefore, in order to have burden-sharing, carbon production must reflect targets on national carbon outputs per capita.

For example, if we look at the United States, it may be the same in absolute terms but if we look at it by population, it is in fact 20 tonnes per person for America, 10 tonnes for Europe, five for China, two for India and one for poor old Africa. It is impossible to assume that somehow we can find an agreement that simply cuts the carbon. It has to reflect social justice and the right of developing countries to develop prosperity and reduce unemployment and poverty which they have in that early stage. Social justice is at the heart of any possible agreement at Cancun. It does not make it any easier, but we must bear in mind that 2 billion people live on this planet on less than $2 a day and that they are largely in the developing countries.

My concern is not repeating that same mistake of anchoring on to the problem of a legally enforceable agreement. My concern was heightened by the statements given by the Prime Minister in the other House and by the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, who said that they believe that is still the target for Mexico. If we make that the target for Mexico, we are bound to make the same complaint and have the same failure. We cannot afford to have another failure at Cancun.

There is an alternative, which I hope the Government will consider, particularly as they say in the same statement that they want a successful conclusion at Mexico. They are absolutely about that. What they can do is to get each nation to declare a voluntary agreement, as many of them are doing, put them together in a global package and let them operate and see how it works in the next few years. That would require them to change the end date of 2012 from Kyoto 1 and extend it to 2015. After all, we are specialists in Europe in stopping the clock. That would allow us to look into whether we can voluntarily exercise this agreement. It needs transparency and accountability and we have to think how to do that, as a challenge for Cancun. If we can do that, we can prevent a failure if we hang on to the legal framework; if we use the voluntary commitment, which China and America have in their programmes, we can make that the global target, work for the agreement and build the trust. Let us see how it works in the next few years. I think that is the way forward.

Failure must not be allowed to happen at Cancun. I believe that the proposal would be a sensible compromise, allowing a continuing discussion and progress to a fully acceptable Kyoto 2. I believe that China and Europe, representing the largest developed countries and the largest developing countries, could make this happen. I hope that the UK will do all that it can to see that is brought about.