Global Climate Change

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Thursday 29th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for this debate. On a personal basis, I also thank him for his great contribution to the Arctic Select Committee, whose report we are debating next week. I am not going to go through the list of all the things in green and environmental policy on which the Government seem to have gone into reverse. My noble friend Lord Greaves did that very adequately at the beginning.

However, I would like to ask the Minister about something where I have a real concern: the recent announcement by the Treasury during Report in the other place on the Finance Bill about changing the tax regime on community energy schemes. I know that in my own area, the south-west, community volunteers in the Exeter area have spent some two years building up these schemes. They have no chance of getting to where they need to be by 30 November, which will now be the cut-off date for taking advantage of that regime. That will really hit communities and volunteers—the people who do this because of their belief in their own communities. I would be interested to hear the Minister comment on that.

I was very pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, raised a specific area that does not otherwise feature in this Government’s policy. It did not feature during the coalition period either but I would like to raise it too. For most of this year, I have been privileged to have been asked by the University of Birmingham to chair a commission for it on “doing cold smarter”. This is the opposite side of the coin to heating as it is about refrigeration and cooling, which are increasingly important. I will illustrate that in a minute but, clearly, we use cooling for ourselves through air conditioning in our homes and cars. We use it increasingly for our data in data centres worldwide. We use it for keeping food eatable and at the right temperature, through refrigeration in our supermarkets and homes. But perhaps even more importantly for some of the themes I will develop, we use it in transport, for medicines and for various scientific processes and implements as well.

It is estimated that in this country now, some 16% of our generated electricity is used to cool rather than to heat. Globally, it is estimated that some 10% of total carbon emissions come from refrigeration and cooling. Internationally, that is important and a good thing because some 50% of vegetables and fruit in the developing world are wasted or spoiled before they get from field to market. This area will grow over the next few decades, partly because in developing countries, particularly in cities, the middle classes and those with greater disposable income will use more refrigeration and air conditioning. This is why the urban environment is important as part of this debate. The most recent statistics I could find were for 2010, when 50 million air-conditioning units were purchased in China alone—in just that one country in one year—because of rising affluence and the issues of temperature and personal comfort which the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, mentioned.

It is estimated that by 2060 the world will use more of its generating capacity for cooling down than it does at the moment for heating, so this is a real issue. I am pleased that the Committee on Climate Change mentioned it in this report. It is the only area of policy and political debate I am aware of that focuses on buildings being designed to dissipate heat in future, as well as to conserve it for fuel poverty and keep it in winter.

One challenge of this area is not just that growing demand, which, to come back to what we are discussing, is particularly in urban areas. It is about much dirtier and more toxic technologies than what else is in our energy landscape. I have to admit that I have blood on my hands because most of my business career was in the freight sector. Latterly, I operated fleets of trucks nationally that were temperature-controlled to distribute to supermarkets. Those of your Lordships who know that industry, or who even look at the streetscape when you walk outside, will know that the majority of refrigerated vehicles have diesel units on the front, which essentially keep the temperatures right for the products inside. The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, mentioned the Euro 6 standard. The fact is that those standards do not apply for transport refrigeration units. In fact, to come back to the important points made by the noble Lord, Lord Borwick, about nitrous oxides, they create something like 30 times more nitrous oxide emissions than diesel engines. They also perform very badly when it comes to particulates. We do not do that smartly but there are fantastic technologies coming forward in the United Kingdom to challenge some of these problems. I hope that the Minister can take an interest in this area, as I am sure he would want to, and discover some of those differences.

One other area relates particularly to the urban environment. I expect all noble Lords who have been to cities in the developing world but also in North America and other places will have walked down a street and seen all these air conditioning units sat outside windows, banked up on high-rise buildings as part of the urban landscape. Of course the outcome of that is that the residents inside manage to remain cool—at huge energy cost—but you also have whole heat islands in urban landscapes, which cause urban heat to rise, so you have this cycle and spiral in terms of energy needs, emissions and everything else.

There are answers to this and ways round it. For instance, although we are not very successful at them, we talk about local district heating networks. There are opportunities for district cooling networks as well—that is one of the technologies we could do. We should be able to change, through liquid air and other technologies, how these refrigerated transport systems work. I was fascinated by the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Young, relating to fashion. Supermarkets will not, on the whole, put doors on their cooling units and displays, because we as consumers would then stop buying as many of those products. Supermarkets therefore have shelves without doors in order to keep their sales up. I cannot criticise that as such—it is our consumer behaviour that maybe is the problem.

When I was very close to Ed Davey and others in the coalition Government, I have to say that I did nothing about this issue—I am guilty. But this is an area where there are big, serious energy challenges into the future, particularly around the urban environment, and about not just carbon pollution but nitrous oxide pollution. This is something for the future. I commend the Committee on Climate Change and the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, for bringing this to people’s attention. We really need to pay attention to this in the future and I hope the Minister will take this up and pursue it. I am very happy to help him to do that.