UN Framework Convention on Climate Change

Debate between Luciana Berger and Lord Lilley

Thursday 18th April 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to participate in this debate under your chairmanship, Mr Turner. Like the Chair of the Energy and Climate Change Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk (Mr Yeo), I must draw the Chamber’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests—not that I am aware of any way in which the outcome of this debate or the issues raised in it could affect my well-being through those interests.

I admit that I was not a member of the Select Committee when it drew up the two reports that we are considering, so I cannot claim credit for them or share in any blame. I put myself forward for the Committee precisely because I was concerned about the rather over-cosy relationship between it and the Government, which has allowed them both, and the whole intellectual establishment in this country, to live in a dream world on energy and climate change issues. Mercifully, through the operation of a secret ballot, I was elected to the Committee.

Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. One of the early signs of madness is an indulgence in compulsive displacement activity, which could not be a better description of the whole COP process. Tens of thousands of people are displaced across the globe to an environment where they are cut off from reality and the rest of the world, where they can indulge themselves in demonstrating their lack of realism and reality, and where the original objective of obtaining a legally binding agreement between nations to reduce worldwide emissions has itself been displaced by the alternative objective of reaching an agreement to meet again—and to agree to reach an agreement at some distant future time. That is displacement activity on a massive scale, and it involves a massive degree of hypocrisy, given the huge emissions incurred by these eco-warriors as they swan across the globe in jets and hire fleets of limousines, so emitting more CO₂ than a small African country.

The aim of displacement activity is of course to avoid facing up to reality, so I will just point out a few facts that have not found their way into the report or into discussions of such matters, but seem to me to be rather pertinent. The original aim of the Kyoto protocol and the agreement in 1992 was to reduce emissions by the contracting parties by 5% by now—or by last year—but world emissions have actually gone up by nearer 50%. By happy chance, the rise in the world temperature over that period was much less than anticipated, despite the fact that the supposed cause of that rise in temperature was even greater and more powerful than anticipated.

Since the Kyoto agreement was signed, Canada, Japan and Russia have resiled from it. Far from making progress in getting countries to sign up, we have lost three very important world players. The US will not sign up to Kyoto or its successor, or to any legally binding agreement, as long as developing countries are allowed to continue to increase their emissions unconstrained. It was not President Bush who prevented America signing up, but the Senate. Senators refused to sign up to Kyoto by 98 votes to zero.

That situation has not changed since President Obama’s election: there is no chance of America signing up to legally binding restraints on its emissions as long as developing countries are not also bound by them. But the developing countries want to grow, and I want them to grow. I do not like seeing hundreds of millions of my fellow human beings wallowing in misery and living lives that are stunted relative to what their material living standards might be if they achieved economic growth. But growth requires energy—it is almost synonymous with the rise in the use of energy—and the growth in energy use needed to raise their living standards will absorb much of their capacity to invest and much of the capital available for them to invest in future decades.

Fossil fuels are the cheapest form of energy. Renewables cost two or more times as much as fossil fuels to produce a given amount of energy. If developing countries were forced to use renewables, they could only afford less than half as much energy as they would otherwise be able to bring on stream. That means they will not use renewables; they will continue to develop by exploiting the use of fossil fuels.

[Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)]

I do not know whether the right hon. Gentleman has had the chance to go to any developing countries, but I had the opportunity to go to Tanzania last year and saw for myself at first hand how communities, which do not have access to any gas or electricity on grid, were successfully harnessing the power of the sun via solar panels to provide whole villages with energy.

[Mr Lilley]

The hon. Lady may seriously believe in the use of renewables in places where it is sensible to use them. If an area is a long way from the grid, it may be sensible to use a windmill or a solar panel, even though it will not provide light at night or electricity when the wind is not blowing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Lilley]

The hon. Gentleman said that we were living through the biggest extinction since perhaps the Palaeozoic era, and he implied that that was through climate change, but he has been unable to cite a single species that has been rendered extinct through climate change. I invite him to do so, or to give me a source where I could find that information.

[Luciana Berger]

rose—

[Luciana Berger]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way. I was able to do some research on my iPad during those interventions, and I was able to identify just one such species—the Ecuadorian harlequin frog.

[Mr Lilley]

That is the one that I was referring to—I said there was one.

[Luciana Berger]

Forgive me. Well, I just found that first one; I will endeavour to find some more species during the course of our debate. That was the first one that came up in my Google search.

--- Later in debate ---

[Luciana Berger]

We were, proudly, the first country in the world to do that, when we passed the Climate Change Act 2008, with a view to reducing our emissions by 2015 in relation to 1990 levels. The Act is held in high regard in countries that I have visited, but legislation is not enough if it is not acted on and if the Government’s actions do not match it. That is why it is important that the Government do all they can to live up to their ambition to be the greenest Government ever, and not slip behind. Then they would be held in high esteem on the international stage.

[Mr Lilley]

The hon. Lady’s party has abandoned unilateralism in nuclear weapons on the ground that setting an example would not stop other countries following a policy of obtaining nuclear weapons, so why does she favour unilateralism in this sphere and argue that inflicting pain and damage on the British economy will encourage other countries to do likewise?

[Luciana Berger]

I disagree with the right hon. Gentleman’s comment.

[Mr Lilley]

It was a question, not a comment.

[Luciana Berger]

We were the first country to introduce a climate change Act, but other countries, such as Mexico, have followed suit, and many others are considering how to reduce their carbon emissions. I agree with the Chancellor’s comments back in 2007, when he said that investment in low carbon could go hand in hand with growth and support our economy. We have seen global trade in low carbon surpass growth in all other fields. Without domestic investment in low carbon in the UK, our national growth figures last year would have been much worse. I believe the two go hand in hand.

What should the Government do? First, they should back the cross-party amendment proposed by the Chair of the Select Committee and my hon. Friend the Member for Brent North, which would put an explicit target for decarbonising the UK energy sector by 2030 in the Energy Bill. That would give businesses the confidence and certainty they are crying out for to invest in low-carbon and renewable generation, and would signal to other nations that we were serious about meeting our climate change targets and moving to a low-carbon economy.

Secondly, the Prime Minister should get a grip on his MEPs and force them to vote in the European Parliament in accordance with the UK Government’s position. That is the only way to regain our lost credibility in the eyes of our EU neighbours. Thirdly, the UK should renew its role as an international political leader on climate change.

Solar Power (Feed-in Tariff)

Debate between Luciana Berger and Lord Lilley

Wednesday 23rd November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Glasgow North West (John Robertson). I agree that we should focus on the costs and budgets of ordinary people, but I have sympathy for the businesses that were lured to invest by the promise of unsustainable subsidies. I have neither sympathy nor respect for the Labour Ministers who set up the scheme knowing full well that the subsidies were unsustainable, and I deeply regret the fact that my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench, in the previous Parliament and this Parliament, took so long to recognise, at least partially, the folly of the scheme.

No one in this place has any excuse for failing to recognise that the subsidies were never remotely justified. The House insists that when a piece of legislation is published, we publish alongside it an impact assessment of the costs and benefits, so that the House will not be so foolish as to go ahead with a measure whose costs exceed its benefits. Have any Labour Members actually read the impact assessment accompanying the scheme?

[Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)]

I have.

[Mr Lilley]

Then the hon. Lady should be even more ashamed of supporting it. The impact assessment published by the Labour Government when the scheme was originally introduced calculated the net present value of the scheme’s future costs to be about £8.6 billion, yet the Labour Government also measured the benefits of using solar rather than hydrocarbons and calculated the direct benefits in the shape of electricity and the indirect benefits—far more important—through the reduction in the damage caused by global warming owing to fewer CO₂ emissions. They calculated that the net present value of all the future benefits, direct and indirect, compared with the costs of £8.6 billion, would be just £400 million. In other words, we knew when we introduced this scheme that the costs were 20 times the assessed benefits, but we went ahead anyway.

I brought that fact to the attention of the House, but more importantly it was brought to the world’s attention by George Monbiot, a distinguished campaigner—unlike me—for measures to stop global warming, when he wrote:

“The government is about to shift £8.6bn from the poor to the middle classes. It expects a loss on this scheme of £8.2 billion, or 95%. Yet the media is silent. The opposition urges only that the scheme be expanded.”

We knew when we introduced the scheme that it would be nonsense even if it went according to plan. It was self-evidently unsustainable. Even halving it today means that we will merely waste £4 billion, or 90% of the expected expenditure.

When I have raised these issues, Ministers have employed two defences. The first is that the impact assessment excluded many knock-on effects. If it did they should have introduced a new one, because impact assessments are supposed to include all the indirect effects. It should not have been signed off by the hapless Minister, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath. Then Ministers pray in aid the fact that the cost of solar energy is declining. They attribute that decline to the scheme, but none of it is due to the scheme, and the idea that our scheme will in any way accelerate the decline in costs worldwide is ridiculous. If something like Moore’s law does indeed apply, so that costs are likely to halve every couple of years, that is a reason for not investing now, but instead waiting until it is economic to do so, which will not be long. If we invest in expensive stuff when inexpensive stuff is going to be available in a few years, we are wasting money.