Climate Change Act

Sammy Wilson Excerpts

Tuesday 10th September 2013 Westminster Hall

[Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)]

All reason and self-critical analysis go out of the window when people address this subject. When I was the Environment Minister in Northern Ireland, I refused to use some of the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s scary propaganda and adverts, and I was censured by the Assembly. When I pointed out to the mover of the censure motion that he had driven to the Assembly that morning in a 4x4 that did about 12 miles per gallon; that his mileage claim for the previous year would have taken him twice around the globe; and that his carbon footprint was enormous, he did not seem to see any irony in the fact that I did not believe what he believed about climate change and the man-made contribution to it, or in the fact that he was moving a motion against my position.

That is one of the problems. Even in today’s debate, we have exchanged the science, the figures and the graphs, but people still do not want to believe what they see before their eyes. I do not want to go into all the figures that have been given today, other than to say that, if the Minister talks about trends, is 150 years not a long enough trend? Yet the increase over 150 years is 0.8° C, even though masses of carbon has been put into the air. If we look at short-term trends—when the Climate Change Bill was passing through Parliament, we were told to look at the short term as well—over 10 years we have seen a 0.08° C increase, despite the fact that carbon emissions have gone up.

I do not want to get into the premise behind the issue; I want to get into the cost behind the policy. I started looking at the Treasury’s Budget 2013. The costs were never hidden; at least we were always told that there would be costs—£18 billion a year. Let us first look at the cost to industry. If we look through the Budget book, there are a number of costs. First, there is the carbon reduction commitment, which affects service and manufacturing industries. It costs more than £1 billion a year and rising. There is the carbon price floor, which wipes out—in fact, by more than double—the impact of the reduction in corporation tax this year. Over the life of this Parliament, it will take £4.4 billion away from industry. The climate change levy will cost £1.5 million this year. Put together, miscellaneous environmental levies will cost £6.7 billion this year, and that is only the cost to industry.

[Steve Baker]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that one of the problems with speaking about such figures in these hallowed halls is that we have forgotten that £1.5 million is quite a lot of money?

[Sammy Wilson]

Yes.

Let us put the cost in terms of jobs in the steel mills that have left Scunthorpe, the aluminium works that have left Anglesey and the brickworks and chemical factories that have closed down. The European Union has warned that there will be—I love this euphemism—carbon leakage. That leakage amounts to millions of jobs in the chemical, fertiliser and other industries. That is the cost that we have to consider when we look at the 2008 Act. There is uncertainty behind it, yet there are real pressures on our economy.

[Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that the cost is not just financial but environmental? For example, the construction of the proposed Navitus bay wind farm off the south coast of Dorset will be an absolute excrescence. That is an additional cost as a result of the policies.

[Sammy Wilson]

I look at my own constituency of East Antrim. The Environmental Minister in Northern Ireland is one of the green zealots who want to see wind farms all around the place. Some of the most beautiful tourist areas are now being destroyed. We market Northern Ireland on its scenic beauty, yet we destroy it. Of course, that impact is unquantifiable.

Let us look at the cost to consumers. Last week in the Chamber we debated the cost of electricity to consumers. Taking DECC’s own figures on the impact of climate change policies on business electricity bills, bills will be up by 22% this year, 46% by 2020 and 66% by 2030.

[Barry Gardiner]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sammy Wilson]

I have already used most of my time, so I do not want to give away any more time.

Domestic consumers’ electricity bills are up by 17% this year, and they will go up by 33% by 2020 and 41% by 2030, but we complain about fuel poverty. There is an almost schizophrenic approach to this question: on the one hand, we complain about the effects; on the other hand, we vigorously pursue a policy that produces those effects.

Every time we go on our holidays, we pay for climate change. Every time we pay our council tax bills, we pay for climate change. In 2007, £102 million was set aside for climate change advisers, climate change managers, carbon reduction advisers and so on, and the situation is probably far worse now. Whether we are paying our council tax or electricity bills, or looking at jobs, the impact is quite dramatic.

People say, “Oh, but the other side is that there are all these green jobs,” and that those jobs will somehow offset the problems. Actually, all the studies show that, for every green job, 2.2 jobs are lost in other sectors of the economy. Every green job created in Europe—this was in a European study—costs about €600,000, which is far more than jobs in other sectors. For the capital we have to invest to get one green job, we could get 4.8 jobs in the wider economy. The myth that green is somehow good for growth is not, therefore, backed up by the facts or even by reports from those who drive many of these polices.

I am glad that there is at least a wider debate about the issue. The one thing we know is that the general public have not been convinced; that is why there have been scare stories about food stocks running out, cities being submerged, 20-metre increases in tides and wildlife being wiped out. Indeed, Professor Schneider and Sir John Houghton both said we needed scare stories, because that is the only way to focus people on the issue. Of course, in their boldness, the likes of the Met Office and the BBC have given their scare stories far too short a time period, and they are now being proved wrong. It is okay if people say something will happen in 100 years, but if they say it will happen in 10 years, people will remember, and if it does not happen, the scare will not have much of an effect.

Let me close with the words of the Chancellor, which I hope will prevail in Government policy. He has said that we make up less than 2% of the world’s carbon emissions, so we should not try to save the planet by putting business in our country at risk. That is why this is a good debate and why we need to keep pressing on this issue.

--- Later in debate ---

[David Mowat]

That is a different matter, namely adaption. I have a lot of sympathy with that point, particularly given the world’s record in failing to get people to agree to act over the last decade or so. However, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley) said, the science is clear: greenhouse gases and water vapour increase temperature, and other things do too. What we do not know, and what the whole debate in science is about, is the weight of those factors.

There are people, who are probably cleverer than anybody in this room, wrestling with that issue, and I do not intend to get into it, other than to say a couple of things. It is probably true that the temperature has not risen for the last 10 or 12 years. Does that, in itself, undermine the thrust of the science and the models? It does not. There will always be a probability of such things, given the noise in the data. However, the Minister or the Opposition Front-Bench speaker might like to tell us how many years of no warming we must have before we seriously question the models. At the very least, the fact that we have had so many years of small amounts of warming tends, under Bayesian probability theory, to take us to the lower end of the forecasts.

As I say, I accept the science. We have seen the Stern report, warts and all, and the costs involved. Parliament put in place the Climate Change Act and the 80% reduction to try to keep the temperature rise to 2° C by 2100, and it was helped in that by five Budgets. There are some good things in the Act. First, it focuses on carbon, not renewables. EU legislation focuses almost entirely on renewables, which is why we are sucked into the false impression that countries such as Germany, which produces significantly more carbon per unit of GDP or per capita than us, are the good guys, who can burn coal and have renewables. Frankly, if a country wants to reduce carbon, it does not have renewables, it stops burning coal. So that is a good aspect of the Climate Change Act. The Act is also clear and hard to fudge. It is also inflexible, which is a strength and a weakness.

The issues I have with the Act are threefold. First, it is, broadly speaking, uncosted. Secondly, it is inflexible, and I will return to that in the light of some of the facts, which are changing. Thirdly, and most importantly—I disagree with the hon. Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) on this—it is, broadly speaking, unilateral: nobody else has put in place anything as stringent, and if I am wrong, I look forward to the Minister telling me so at the end.

On the Act being uncosted, it may well be right for the world to address the issue of climate change, but that does cause fuel poverty. That might be a price worth paying, although that case has not been made very much, and the Government might pursue it a little more. Of course, carbon leakage also means, at the margin, that we are losing jobs in some industries—particularly heavy industries in the north—because they rely heavily on power. It always strikes me as a little odd, at a time when we are trying to rebalance the economy, that we are putting manufacturing at a potential disadvantage, although that has not wholly happened yet, and we will see how things pan out.

[Sammy Wilson]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that it is not just jobs in manufacturing that are being lost? For example, it is estimated that a medium-sized data processing company will pay £500,000 in tax under the carbon reduction commitment—a tax, of course, that the Government now keep, rather than recycling.

[David Mowat]

I do accept that, and that cost of £500,000 translates into jobs lost.

The real problem is that the Act is unilateral. It has been said that Britain produces 1.5% of the world’s emissions, which is about the amount China’s emissions increased by last year. The Act was predicated on the assumption that we would take a world leadership position in all this stuff and that the world would follow us. However, it increasingly appears that the world does not wish to follow us, and we are seeing that in a number of ways; there are words and there are actions. The Minister mentioned Germany, and I alluded earlier to its decision to abandon nuclear power, build dirty coal stations at great pace and to refuse to use carbon capture and storage technology, despite the fact that its carbon emissions are higher than ours.

Even more significant, however, is the fact that the EU has recently voted to abandon its emissions trading scheme.