Net Zero

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, slightly to my surprise, I very much welcome this report by Chris Skidmore and I agree with pretty much everything the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, said. Chris Skidmore has performed two key changes in mindset on this for us—if we are prepared to follow them.

First, it is now very difficult for the darker sides of His Majesty’s Treasury and other bits of Whitehall—and, indeed, the less progressive elements of industry—to claim that there is a conflict between government intervention to improve economic performance and intervention contributing to our environmental target of net zero. Net zero is an economic strategy; it is the only one in town. The environmental is economical. What is good for carbonisation is good for economic progress and Britain’s economic leadership.

Secondly, the report finds that the present policies for reducing greenhouse gases are clearly nowhere near sufficient—or, more accurately, are not yet being pursued sufficiently vigorously and in sufficient detail to add up to an effective net-zero pathway. We need to confront these big points. It is not news that we are falling short on a lot of our environmental targets; the Climate Change Committee points this out regularly. What is new is that we must now recognise that these failures are also profound economic failures. They will affect us economically in terms of our prosperity as well as being a setback to our achievement of the net-zero strategy.

We must recognise that, although dramatic changes in technology may come through in the coming decades and help us meet our net-zero goals, most of the progress we make until at least 2035 will have to be done with technology that we already have or is already pretty close to proving. This means that we will need a much clearer map of technological choices and government decisions. For example, we need big early decisions on fuel and energy; on the deployment of new forms of nuclear power, including SMRs; and on the role of hydrogen.

Hydrogen is seen as a solution to our most acute problems in replacing fossil fuels. We probably need to use hydrogen for heavily energy-intensive industries and heavy transport such as marine, road, rail and, possibly, aviation. However, we cannot expect hydrogen to be produced in a green form that is also sufficient to provide a basis for heating our buildings. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, said, we probably need instead to mandate heat pumps or some other technology, such as district heating, together with a proper, solid, greatly enhanced energy efficiency programme, national installation standards for all new build and substantially greater, more targeted resources for retrofitting buildings. The other thing we need is a greater emphasis on land use and agriculture than is in the Skidmore report; not enough of it focuses on how we produce our food and use our land.

Thirdly, we need brave decisions on road vehicles. This means getting rid of all petrol and diesel cars more rapidly, probably with road rationing—by price or by zoning—as well.

Lastly, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, said, we need coherence in government. We need proper cross-government machinery. A shadowy committee about which none of us knows and which has no clear conclusions and no clear strategy is not enough. We need a proper office for net zero, and it has to transcend the whole of Whitehall and, indeed, the whole machinery of government at all levels in this country.