Climate Change

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2019 Lords Chamber

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[Lord Teverson]

That this House takes note of the threats presented by climate change.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I remind the House that I am a trustee of the Green Purposes Company, which owns a green share in the Green Investment Bank.

It is a long time since I have been involved full-time in business, though I was for many years. During that time, one of the things that did not happen was that at each board meeting we did not look at corporate risk registers. They sort of existed, but not in the way that they do at the moment—the ones with probability up one side of the graph and impact along the other. They have big red boxes at the top right-hand corner which tells you what you really need to pay attention to as a business or as an organisation.

As I prepared for this debate, I thought that surely these are what we need globally—maybe the United Nations or whatever has a view on that—to give us the priorities. And, hey presto, the World Economic Forum now meeting in Davos has a global risks report. Guess what? Up in that top right-hand bright red corner, there are three particular risks, all environmental. The first one and the highest is that of extreme weather events, the second is natural disasters, and the third is our inability or potential inability to solve mitigation and adaptation policies in terms of climate change. I congratulate Davos on pinpointing some of the issues I want to go through in this debate.

Last year we celebrated 10 years of the Climate Change Act here in the UK—something that we can really be proud of across all parties in this Chamber, and in the House of Commons as well. A decade before that, in December 1997, the world agreed the Kyoto Protocol at the third conference of the parties. Again, that was the first time that the global community came together and really concentrated on how to solve the issue of climate change. Yet we have a background today where global temperatures are already 1 degree above pre-industrial levels; we have more than 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere; and we are now warned by the IPCC that we risk hitting that new target of 1.5 degrees by 2030. That is the context of our debate this afternoon.

What are the threats? Well, they are many. I suppose it is depressing to go through this list, but I will because that is the topic of the debate. I promise to try to raise our spirits as we go through this discussion. Clearly, there are the obvious ones to do with extreme weather: flooding; on the ocean side, sea-level rises, the potential of ocean currents stopping or changing, and ocean acidification; all the areas to do with the nature of biodiversity; the threat to our species from diseases migrating from the tropics northwards—and southwards—and, of course, invasive species, which we debated in the House yesterday on a secondary legislation instrument. Not least is the threat to the ice cover of our planet at the polar regions. Those threats give rise to consequential issues such as potential crop failure, human morbidity because of high temperatures, large migration and financial instability. I want to mention the strong role of Mark Carney as Governor of the Bank of England in raising these issues globally as well as in this country.

The effects of such threats are already being seen. We have seen droughts in Australia and South Africa; we have seen forest fires in Australia and California; and, in the United Kingdom, we have seen flooding and various other extreme events far more regularly than we used to.

However, the world has made progress. In 2014-16, emissions of carbon dioxide across the globe plateaued. In Kyoto, a big issue was the rising levels of emissions from both China and India. They were much smaller economies then but were growing very quickly, and they felt, rightly, that the developed world should take the strain on mitigation. However, we saw in Paris both those countries getting involved, with China starting to say that it should be the leader, taking over in many ways from the European Union and the United States.

We then had the Paris Agreement some two or three years ago, where it was agreed that we should move on from Kyoto and the disastrous Copenhagen conference and aim for 2 degrees and hopefully 1.5 degrees. In Katowice at the end of last year, a rulebook was agreed on how those targets should be met and how we assess carbon emissions. So we had good news worldwide. As for the United Kingdom, one of its greatest strengths in the past, as shown by the Climate Change Act, has been political consensus. Political bodies, business and NGOs all see it as a real issue that we should tackle. We can proudly say that the United Kingdom has reduced carbon emissions by some 43% from the 1990 baseline, yet we have had economic growth of 70% over that time, so we have seen a decoupling. We do not often hear it, but it is also calculated that we have saved some £4 billion per annum in our energy bills as a nation because of increased energy efficiency. As for our green technologies, the cost of solar has decreased by some 78% since 2010 and, over two years, the cost of offshore wind fell by 50%. I remember our debates during the coalition years about the “energy trilemma”. We no longer have that, because renewables represent the cheapest form of electricity generation. We no longer have issues around the cost of renewables, sustainability and probably energy security as well. Also understated is the economic engine that renewables can give us. Even in the dark days of 2008 in the depths of recession, the green economy grew by some 5% to 7%—with good jobs and not the bad ones.

However, the threats that I listed earlier are already starting to change our lives. They affect regions differently and the clock is ticking. Unlike in that other debate where an issue is the clock ticking, unfortunately we do not have the ability to extend the equivalent of Article 50. This is it and we have to make sure that we are able to meet the challenge.

Despite all that good news, there is not-so-good news as well. In 2017 global emissions went up by 1.6%; in 2018 it is estimated that they will be up by something like 2.6%. I regret to say that much of that growth has come from China and India. Even in the EU, where our track record has been good, our ability to reduce carbon emissions has plateaued and started to go down. Even if everybody who signed up to the Paris Agreement performs, we will still have a rise of some 3% in global emissions. Here in the UK, our great achievement of a 43% reduction is almost exclusively from the power sector, nearly all from taking coal out of the system. We are almost at the end of that road and cannot push that policy further; therefore, we have big questions about where we go, particularly now we are challenged by the withdrawal of Hitachi and Toshiba from our nuclear programme. We are now seen as being top of the subsidies league on fossil fuels within Europe, with some £10 billion-worth of subsidies per annum—although, probably like the Government, I question how that arithmetic was arrived at.

Perhaps most worrying of all is that investment in renewable technologies has plummeted and we are now at the lowest level of investment for a decade. I do not want to get into party politics here, except in one area: that consensus perhaps started to divide in 2015 with the Osborne Budget, when we had the privatisation of the GIB, the end of zero-carbon homes, the end of onshore wind, the end of carbon capture and storage and a relatively hostile taxation regime coming back in. But we have had, I am sure the Minister will remind me, a lot of strategies. We have had the clean growth strategy, the 25-year environment plan, the national adaptation programme, the “road to zero” strategy and the resources and waste strategy. That is great, but there has been little action around those strategies, and that is the big issue.

In transport, our emissions are going up. Our target for 2040 on electric vehicles, which does not include vans and is still fairly iffy, is seen as quite inefficient. In heating, which is a large proportion of our carbon emissions now, we have no strategy that we have started to implement, and the same is true for agriculture, although there has been good news from the NFU and its strategy to go to zero carbon by 2040. So there is much to do.

I have one or two questions for the Minister. The first is on carbon budgets. The climate change committee tells us we will not meet the fourth and fifth carbon budgets: it is saying that categorically. How are we going to meet those two carbon budgets, the last of which ends in 2032, only a little over a decade from now? That climate change committee report to Parliament put forward four principles, very constructively. It said to the Government—and to all Governments—first, support the simple, low-cost options. That obviously means offshore wind in particular, but others as well. Secondly, the committee said that we should commit to effective regulation and strict enforcement. Even on those houses where we now have higher standards of insulation than we did, do local authorities ever check them? I suspect not. Third was the end of chopping and changing of policy—that is a real pointer to all of us here in politics—and fourth was the suggestion that we act now to keep long-term options open. Clearly, those four are simple ways in which really to start to concentrate on this issue here in the UK. Are the Government taking up those recommendations?

It is quite obvious that tackling climate change now, as the noble Lord, Lord Stern, said in his original report, is far cheaper than doing it in the future. It is not only cheaper; it offers growth for our economy to get ahead. Yet we already have insurance costs, and those threats of costs to households, companies and the country are affecting us now.

The United Kingdom needs to regain its leadership in this area. When I was young, my mother always used the phrase “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”. I say to the Government that the road to a scorched planet is paved with worthy strategies rather than action. I beg to move.