Fourth Carbon Budget

Malcolm Wicks Excerpts

Tuesday 17th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Chris Huhne]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his question. The energy-intensive work group that we have set up between my Department and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills will come forward with a set of measures by the end of the year. That is a clear commitment. As he knows, there are a number of ways to help energy-intensive industries, including the free allocation of units under the EU emissions trading scheme and encouraging a move towards the use of biomass and biofuels, for example. We are looking at all those measures to ensure that we can balance the concerns of the energy-intensive industries as well as make substantial progress towards the low-carbon economy.

[Malcolm Wicks (Croydon North) (Lab)]

The climate change targets that the last Parliament legislated for were arguably the most ambitious thing that any Parliament in this country has ever legislated for. I certainly welcome the broad thrust of the coalition Government’s proposals today, even if the Secretary of State failed to understand that turning over turf during his term of office depended on four years of preparatory work, which I am happy to discuss with him.

Many of the goods that we consume in Britain used to be manufactured in Britain. They are now manufactured in places such as China, thereby producing carbon emissions, and then imported into this country. Those carbon emissions in China and elsewhere occur only because of demand from western societies such as ours. Given that we are talking about a global phenomenon, does the Secretary of State have any ideas for how Europe as a whole can use its influence to bring about appropriate carbon reduction policies in places such as China, India and elsewhere?

[Chris Huhne]

The right hon. Gentleman’s question is an interesting one, as I would expect, given his background as an Energy Minister and his expertise in this field. Wherever one goes in the world, people will say that everyone else is working much less hard on the low-carbon agenda than they are. That is the prevailing myth. I was recently speaking to my counterpart in Australia, who said that the entire debate there is about how only the Australians are dealing with climate change and no one else is. The reality is that enormous progress is being made on this agenda right across the board, including in India and China. The five-year plan that the Chinese have just established is enormously ambitious. Six of the largest renewables companies in the world are now Chinese. The Chinese are making an enormous commitment to offshore wind, as well as in more conventional sectors such as nuclear. They are now the dominant player in solar photovoltaics, having taken the lead from Germany, so I simply do not accept that this is a world where we are moving ahead of other people. We are moving ahead together, but it will be the people who move furthest and fastest who get the best prizes.