Net Zero Carbon Emissions: UK’s Progress

Mary Creagh Excerpts

Thursday 28th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Layla Moran]

Who doesn’t like AOC? She’s fantastic. The green new deal was something we started when my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Sir Edward Davey) was Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, but that has now been removed from the Cabinet. That is an example of how the Government do not take this seriously enough—there is now not a Cabinet member whose sole purpose is to talk about climate change. It is not good enough. So my first question to the Minister is: are we planning to have a net zero emissions target for the UK, and if so when? I understand that the current target is 80% by 2050, which is not good enough.

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Lady regret that in government the Liberal Democrats oversaw the scrapping of the Department of Energy and Climate Change—

[Sir Edward Davey (Kingston and Surbiton) (LD)]

No, we didn’t.

[Mary Creagh]

I thought they did, but perhaps I am wrong. It was a machinery of government change. I am happy to be corrected if that is not the case. [Interruption.] It was subsumed into the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. But we also saw the end of the green new deal and of the energy efficiency standards in homes, which means we have a carbon lag that will be more difficult—[Interruption.]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. First, there is too much noise. Secondly, I appreciate that the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran) is being generous in taking interventions, but she is being generous with the time later in the debate when many people want to speak, and those who are intervening now might not be those sitting here for the whole debate. I encourage her to make some progress.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

I applaud the hon. Members for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran) and for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) for securing this debate. It is a great pleasure to be able to debate an issue that is one of many that are more important than Brexit, although some of my constituents disagree. What we are discussing is an existential issue; in a year or two, if I am optimistic, or more, if I am pessimistic, we will have moved on from Brexit—I promise.

[Mary Creagh]

You say that!

[Richard Benyon]

I can dream.

It is absolutely imperative that we tackle this issue of carbon emissions. The Pentagon, surprisingly for some, has looked carefully at the impact of climate change and our ability to tackle it. It refers to climate change as a “risk escalator”: it increases pressure on migration and imposes the huge cost of stabilising failed states, with the impact that that can have on the security of the world. No one should underestimate the impact that climate change will have and is having on all our lives.

I find it fascinating to look at the crucial nexus between environmental degradation and security. We face a huge challenge—not just because of the recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and all that comes from those, but because of the wider context and implications of not tackling climate change.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon). I advise him to keep his mobile phone switched on, given the news that the Fisheries Minister, the hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice), has just resigned. The Government may be looking for a new Fisheries Minister, and it may be the right hon. Gentleman’s lucky day yet again. In the great tradition of reusing and recycling Ministers, I can think of no finer replacement.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I really cannot allow the hon. Lady to get away with that. If she thinks it is a privilege or a delight to be a Fisheries Minister at present, she must be dreaming in ways of which I know she is not capable.

[Mary Creagh]

I wonder whether the hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth has resigned so that he does not have to answer the letter that my Committee has just drafted, which asks him about our progress towards becoming a so-called independent coastal state and how the negotiations with various regional fisheries organisations are going.

Let me now turn to the subject of the debate. Securing a sustainable future for the planet and our children is a responsibility that we simply cannot ignore. I welcome the chance to discuss this issue, because we have spent far too long discussing Brexit in the Chamber and not enough time discussing the thumping alarm that is being sounded all around us on our planet.

To achieve net zero, we must reduce our emissions rapidly and at scale in every area of our economy and in every area of our lives. Our Committee has talked about some of the personal changes that we can make, whether that means turning our backs on single-use plastics or considering how we can achieve, for example, a net-zero fashion industry. The report that we published last week took climate change into areas where it may not previously have gone.

[Stephen Doughty]

Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the personal things we can all do is look into where our pensions are invested and establish, for instance, whether they are invested in fossil fuels or renewables? I have been doing that, and I hope that we will give some thought to where our moneys are going in the context of the parliamentary pension scheme.

[Mary Creagh]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. One of the things we did in our green finance reports last year was talk to the top 25 pension funds in the country and ask them what they were doing in this area, and of course we talked to our own parliamentary pension fund as well, and we ranked them as engaged, moderately engaged and less engaged. We need to shape and bend the entire financial system to invest in this new green economy and to ensure a just transition, because in areas such as mine, Wakefield, which were dependent on coal, we must not have thousands of people just being left on the dole. We need to skill up the current generations to meet the green future we want to see.

[Mr Sheerman]

Does my hon. Friend agree that one of our other great strengths is our great science in this country—the science base? Good policy based on great science really works.

[Mary Creagh]

I totally and passionately agree. We on the Environmental Audit Committee are privileged to have global thought leaders appearing before us and giving us the best available science. It is sometimes rather chilling, however; for example, Professor Jim Skea from the IPCC told us that our assumptions about how quickly we can decarbonise are perhaps over-optimistic and based on new technologies that have not yet been invented, so perhaps the discount rate for future technologies needs to be lower than at present. There are some truly profound moments in our Committee, and I am sure my hon. Friend would be very welcome to join it; we also have a couple of spaces for Conservative Members, so I hope we can get some volunteers following today’s discussion.

We have been leaders in this, and people still look to the UK for both thought leadership and policy action leadership. We provided that under the last Labour Government with the Climate Change Act 2008. A weakness in that Act has become apparent, however: there was no review process. We set up the Committee on Climate Change, which advises the Government—all well and good—but then it is up to the Government to heed that advice or to ignore it, which is less good, and there is no review process, so now if we do need to set this zero net emissions target, we will need to re-legislate, and I will be interested to hear from the Minister about the necessary policy mechanisms.

We have signed up to the 2015 Paris agreement and to the UN sustainable development goals to create a more equitable, sustainable world. Our Government will subject us to a voluntary national review at the UN this year, and I urge all Members of this House to participate in that process. It is about how we end poverty, violence and hunger in every aspect of our communities. Our Committee has looked at the hunger aspect, and I welcome the fact that the Department for Work and Pensions and the Office for National Statistics will now start to measure hunger in our country. Real sustainability comes not just with social justice, but with climate justice as well.

I want to talk about why net zero emissions matter. In October 2018, the UN’s leading scientists—some of whom were British—showed what could happen if we do not get to net zero. Extreme weather is already happening; the warming is already with us, as we are seeing with the tragic events on Saddleworth Moor, the heatwaves in the Artic last year and the fact that we have had the hottest February day on record. The Arctic is warming twice as quickly as the rest of the planet, and in February 2018 temperatures at the North Pole rose above freezing during the polar nights, which is when the sun has not even started to come up; it was 30° higher than normal. When we talk about an average of 1.5°, that means a 7° rise at the North Pole. That is catastrophic for the melting of the sea ice.

We had a deadly summer last year, and we also had the highest number of excess deaths last year because of the beast from the east; we had 40,000 excess winter deaths in this country. So when we talk about climate, we are also talking about ourselves; we are talking about the fact that we are conducting a vast experiment on the only system on which our life depends. We do not know what we are doing; we do know how to stop it, but there is a kind of collective passivity around the action needed. When we see cities such as Cape Town in South Africa running out of water, and when we see power stations in Australia unable to work because it is too hot, we have to ask ourselves what a 1.5° or even a 2° warmed world will look like.

The IPCC also showed us what the difference is between 1.5° and 2°. At 2° sea levels will be 10 cm higher. That means 10 million more people will be affected by flooding and coastal erosion. That is what the difference between 1.5° and 2° means. At 2°, all coral reefs die. Our children will never see a coral reef at 2°. If we keep the increase to 1.5°, one third of reefs might survive. We have cold water reefs on our shores that we do not know about. We do not value what is beneath the ocean.

Our species are becoming extinct at a rate that has not been seen since the last global mass extinction. We have just been hearing about the insect Armageddon. Our planetary health inquiry found that rates of extinction are between 100 and 1,000 times higher than what is considered to be natural diversity loss. This affects our food systems, because if pollinator populations are devastated, we will have to pollinate our fruit trees by hand, as is already being done in parts of China.

Soil is the only carbon sequestration system that is known to work at scale and for free, yet we keep treating our soil like dirt. [Laughter.] That was my little joke. Soil is the Cinderella ecosystem. We like clean air and clean water, but what we should really like is dirty dirt. The more dirt that is in our soil—I do not mean bad dirt; I mean organic content—the better it is. In Paris, we signed up to increase our soil carbon content by four parts per 1,000, but I have not yet seen any policy to support that, either in the public goods debate around farming or from the Minister. I would be grateful if we heard something about how we will incentivise farmers to achieve that and to incentivise urban guerrilla gardeners such as myself to achieve it in our own homes. If I knew how to do it, believe me I would.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

This is actually a serious interjection, unlike the previous one. I completely agree with the hon. Lady that we have neglected the soil, even though it was clearly identified in the national ecosystem services review, but does she not agree that the move to payment for ecosystem services should enable successive Governments to engage farmers in precisely that kind of activity?

[Mary Creagh]

Indeed it should, but there has to be a baseline measurement, and somebody has to pay for the measurement and the monitoring. The tragedy is that, if we leave the EU, this type of global thought leadership that we are now getting to will be lost and will no longer be able to be transmitted to our friends and colleagues in the EU.

[Ruth George (High Peak) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an important point. In the Peak district, we have Moors for the Future, which is seeking to sequester as much as possible of the 580 million tonnes of carbon that is captured within peat. At the moment, we are seeing 3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere each year because of the degradation of those peat moors due to climate change, industrialisation and lack of care. Will she welcome any commitment that we can get from the Government to finance those important projects?

[Mary Creagh]

Absolutely. I was walking on Lost Lad in my hon. Friend’s constituency at Christmas, and it is an absolutely wonderful part of the world. It is above the Derwent reservoir, and we could actually see the village of Derwent because the water levels were so low. The draining of our peat bogs has been a catastrophe, and we have to re-flood them. Globally, the top 30 cm of soil contains double the amount of carbon that is in the entire atmosphere, so it is vital that our precious peatlands—lowland and upland—should be protected for future generations. They are of global importance.

[Vicky Ford]

May I draw the hon. Lady’s attention to the amazing work being done on soil at Cranfield University, whose Soil and Agrifood Institute is the world leader? By investing in our universities, Britain is leading the thought on how to protect our soils not just across Europe but in many other parts of the world.

[Mary Creagh]

I passionately agree with the hon. Lady. I taught at Cranfield School of Management for seven years, although we never got too deep into the soil at that point because we were busy trying to start businesses. She is right to suggest that we have a long database of soil systems. A lot of people in this country like to collect things and keep them, and that is a great thing to have. We have samples that go back 100 years in some cases.

I want to talk about our carbon budget. The IPCC has calculated that a budget of 420 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide would give us a two-thirds chance of staying within 1.5°C, and that a 580 gigatonne budget would give us a 50:50 chance of doing so. Those are not betting odds. If I were told that I had a 50:50 chance of something happening, I would not think those are great odds, so 580 gigatonnes is not a good budget to have.

This larger budget, 580 gigatonnes, is the equivalent of 10 years of global emissions at 2017 levels. To achieve that, the global production and consumption of coal must fall by 80%—again, we have done important and good things on that in our country—and the global production and consumption of oil and gas must fall by 50% by 2030. That is why I have come to the conclusion that fracking is not compatible with the 12 years we have left, and it is why I regret that it is being treated as a national infrastructure project rather than onshore wind, which has the power to give us the clean energy we need.

We know there is uncertainty, and we know there are tipping points. We do not know what will happen if we get to 1.5°, but we know that, for example, if the permafrost thaws, releasing methane, or if the sea ice collapses, these things can accelerate.

We can tackle emissions and deliver healthier cities, healthier people and a healthier planet. The Committee’s latest inquiry on planetary health is looking at how these complex systems deliver. We have seen exponential growth of wind and solar, and we are experiencing an industrial revolution. We have done things we thought impossible 10 or 12 years ago, for which I pay tribute to politicians on both sides of the House. The revolution is happening at the speed of the technological revolution, which is good. Big data will help us in this fight, too, but we will need renewable energy to supply between 70% and 80% of all global power by 2050.

In this country, we have done a lot on electricity, but the Committee on Climate Change has said that this progress has

“masked failures in other areas.”

We have seen very small reductions in agriculture and buildings-related emissions. At a time when Persimmon is paying its chief executive £75 million, we have to ask why we are subsidising the Help to Buy scheme. Why are we not subsidising ground source or air source heat pumps, as is happening in Sweden, to make sure we have zero-carbon homes?

[Kerry McCarthy]

The Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee is making an excellent speech, as would be expected. She mentions that very little progress has been made in agriculture. I know this is part of the planetary health inquiry to an extent, but nearly 10 years ago, on 25 March 2009, I had a debate—I think it was the first such debate in Parliament—on the impact of the livestock sector on the environment. I was laughed at and ridiculed by most people, but I still keep banging away at it. The public are now with us, and so many people are reducing their meat consumption for environmental reasons. Does she think it is time that politicians had the courage to grasp that nettle and make improvements?

[Mary Creagh]

I totally agree. There is always a danger that we get called a nanny state, but if nannies are good enough for people on very large incomes—naming no names—we should provide the nannying for people with less money.

It is encouraging how, in some ways, the public have got ahead of politicians, such as with the rise of flexitarianism. We are all trying to eat less meat because of our knowledge, particularly about processed meat and the risks from nitrites. What does a net zero diet look like? What does a net zero city look like? We will have to start mapping out these big changes. Where we lead, other countries will quickly follow.

My hon. Friend is right that we need to examine the livestock sector and work out how we cut its emissions globally and at scale.

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech, and she makes an important point about the way in which individual behaviour needs to be complemented by Government policy. That is particularly resonant for me today, because today I have got rid of my car and have become entirely reliant on walking, cycling and public transport. I am able to do that only because Nottingham has invested significantly in public transport. Is it not really disappointing that transport is one sector that is not pulling its weight at the moment? There has been little change in the level of transport emissions since 2008. Do not the Government need to get their act together to enable more people to make greener choices?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. I appreciate the importance of the hon. Lady’s point, but, sadly, her intervention is too long. And I am sure the Chairman of the Select Committee will soon be drawing her remarks to a close.

[Mary Creagh]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. My hon. Friend is right to say that there has been a net increase in transport emissions over the past five years.

I want to conclude by talking about what we need to do and what policies the Government need to adopt. Government is the largest purchaser of goods and services in the country. I have been banging on about the need for the NHS, which has a huge budget, to decarbonise its fleet rapidly. We have had the NHS sustainable development unit before our Committee; there is talk about doing this by 2028, but that is too late. We need electric vehicles in every town and city. There is no sense in midwives and district nurses going out and polluting the cities, and then talking to parents about treating their kids’ asthma—that is absurd. We need cross-government working on this.

We need to talk about the difficult-to-decarbonise sectors, particularly heavy industry and transport. We come back to things such as bus regulation here; mayors could have the powers to state where buses go. We have Stagecoach today saying, “The stuff in Manchester is outrageous,” but it is running profitable bus services. We need to force these companies to invest in new, cleaner vehicles. We also need to look at our energy systems. Some 31 million homes in this country run on gas. How are we going to get them to a clean gas source? Is it going to be hydrogen? Is it going to be air source heat pumps? How are we going to lag those buildings? This is not that hard, but we need to choose our policy sectors. When we choose our sectors and our actions, we can have a just transition. We can have that new green deal. We know that the mayors are willing to do this.

Finally, we need to make sure that our financial systems are looking at the risks: the physical risk from flooding; and the transitional risk from stranded assets in coal and oil and gas-fired power stations, which our pensions are currently being invested in. We also need to make sure that we have a stable policy environment. The Government can be a leader on this. The Minister has proven that she can be a leader, not least in the actions she took in heading off a no-deal Brexit in the past couple of days. We need to practise what we preach. Net zero is not the end; it is just the start of the next mountain to climb.