Energy Bill [HL]

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Monday 19th October 2015 Lords Chamber

I am delighted that carbon negativity has come up, and I am grateful to the noble Lords, Lord Oxburgh and Lord Howell, for mentioning it. It is an anomaly. As I mentioned, we have these carbon budgets, and both the inventory submitted at international negotiations and our own budgets would credit negative emissions if we had the right mechanism to do so. We could be helping to meet our targets through the use of carbon-negative technologies, both domestically and internationally, if we could just find a way to certify that and make sure that it was done well. It is certainly not beyond our wit to be able to certify such things. If you move in the world of engineering solutions to climate change, as I do, you meet many people who already have or are very close to having projects that deliver carbon-negative emissions. One I am particularly fond of—it is near to where I live in Cambridgeshire—is the Carbon 8 company, which takes hazardous waste from an incinerator, combines it with CO₂ derived from a biomass plant and turns it into a permanent aggregate which is then made into building materials that can be used to build buildings and infrastructure.

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

Does the noble Baroness agree that those of us who are farmers take carbon dioxide out of the air as much as we can every summer—and then unfortunately put it back into the air by feeding it to people in the winter?