Climate Change: UN Conference

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Wednesday 7th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, the noble Baroness is right that we need to ensure that ambition is always at the heart of what we do. However, we need to make sure that the rest of the world is coming with us so that we all remain competitive as well. Although the noble Baroness is right that we keep raising our ambitions, we need to make sure that others’ ambitions are raised as well.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, one of the interesting developments at Lima was the inclusion of a paragraph, in the document to go forward to Paris, saying that the use of fossil fuels should be ended globally by 2050. Do the Minister and the Government welcome that thought which was put forward and promoted very much by the Catholic Church? Is that not a good second bow to the very dry climate-change targets that we have at the moment, important as they are, and a really positive way to go forward?

[Baroness Verma]

I am extremely grateful to my noble friend for raising an important point. We are weighing up the position of developing and developed countries in trying to get on to the same trajectory, so we need to be sure about the impacts there will be on the developing nations as well as the developed ones. We need to encourage everyone to be less dependent on fossil fuels and to do much more on the renewables sector.