Methane (Environment and Climate Change Committee Report)

Viscount Stansgate Excerpts

Tuesday 13th May 2025 Grand Committee

[Viscount Stansgate (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very grateful for the opportunity to say a few words in the gap. I congratulate the committee on its report and the chair on her opening speech and on securing the debate.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Jay, I am a methane learner. I remember first discovering its importance in the late 1980s, when I talked to Sir Jack Lewis, who had been appointed by Mrs Thatcher as chair of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and who later became a Member of this House. It struck me at the time that this concentration—80 times, as has been mentioned several times—was very powerful stuff. I think it is a 45% reduction that would help meet our Paris climate change target of 2030.

On the other hand, I am encouraged by some recent research. Last year, I came across something by Professor Vincent Gauci of the University of Birmingham. Apparently, microbes in tree bark in the world’s forests absorb much more methane than previously thought. Tree bark has previously been overlooked for its climate contribution. Apparently, if all the tree bark in the world was laid flat, it would cover the surface of the earth, so it represents a vast area for gas exchange between bark and atmosphere.

Scientific research these days is often about vast quantities of data generated in a wide variety of areas, of which climate change is one. Last Friday, I happened to visit the Harwell Space Cluster. Believe me, the sheer amount of data it deals with from earth observation satellites is phenomenal, as I am sure the Committee will appreciate. I make the point to my noble friend the Minister and others that it is vital to continue to collect this data. I will direct my remarks towards chapter 3 of the committee’s report, recommendation 7 and the Government’s response to it.

Ordinarily, to say something like “collect the data” would be neither unusual nor particularly interesting. However, we live in a time when things are changing. On 16 April, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced a whole list of datasets regarding ocean monitoring that will be removed by the middle of this month. On 23 April, the BBC reported:

“Swathes of scientific data deletions are sweeping across US government websites—with decades of health, climate change and extreme weather research at risk. Now, scientists are racing to save their work before it’s lost”.


This is a tremendously important point. I can give the Committee further examples. Apparently, somebody researching the history of the Greenland ice sheet is afraid that all the data related to it will be deleted by the American authorities one way or another. It may be that the data shows a different pattern of Greenland’s ice sheets in the past that would affect our calculation of the future.

My time is almost up, so my plea to my noble friend the Minister is that, when he takes part in discussions with other countries on behalf of the British Government—I believe there is a UNFCCC conference in June 2027 on the horizon—he will do everything he can to ensure that we continue to collect the data without which debates like this are not possible and without which we cannot measure and make the progress we need to make on climate change.