Global Warming & Climate Change

18 January 2005

Mr Robert Key (Salisbury) (Con): This Government have spent eight years pandering to popular prejudice and patronising the public. The more they have established citizens' juries, focus groups, stakeholder forums or consensus conferences, the more we have seen the public disengaging from the real processes of democratic policies. The Government may think that that is participative democracy, but it has allowed them to say one thing and do another. Therefore, I am grateful to the hon. Member for Mansfield (Mr. Meale) for his tour d'horizon, which gives us the opportunity to look both at the record and to the future.

Speaking of saying one thing and doing another, what the Minister has just told the hon. Member for Lewes (Norman Baker) will not wash. It is as clear as mud. Although the Minister said that the Government were not removing the figures, that is precisely what they were doing. When they sought to delete from the draft spring 2005 European Council conclusions 21 words that would secretly change policy on global warming and climate change—in the UK and throughout the EU—they were tampering with 21 words that could literally change the world. I hope the Minister will explain to an astonished world what on earth the Government were up to in Brussels. The explanation that he has given so far is completely inadequate. Labour has been all talk on the environment. The Prime Minister personally committed himself and his Government to leading the march towards a more sustainable world. In the 1997 Labour election manifesto, he promised to go beyond the Kyoto commitment of a 12.5 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and set a target of a 20 per cent reduction in CO 2 emissions by 2010. A further goal was set: a 60 per cent reduction in CO 2 emissions by 2050. In 2004, the Prime Minister reaffirmed his commitment to

"the single most important issue that we face as a global community".

However, in December 2004, the Government admitted that, based on current policies alone, the UK will not achieve the 20 per cent reduction target by 2010. Instead, current policies are likely to lead to a reduction of around 14 per cent.

Therefore, since coming to power in 1997, Labour has failed to deliver any measurable reduction in carbon emissions. In fact emissions rose in four of the first six years that Labour was in power. Interestingly, Conservative policies achieved a 7.3 per cent reduction between 1990 and 1997. Carbon emissions in the transport and household sectors, which account for around 40 per cent of the UK's emissions, are expected to grow.

Labour has let the country down on sustainable development. Even the green movement—at least 5 million citizens in the United Kingdom—has now declared war on the Government. The executive director of Greenpeace, Stephen Tindale, declared in November:

" So far Blair's record on climate change is almost entirely a record of fine words and no action."

The Government have failed to resolve the energy crisis resulting from the decline of indigenous energy supplies and increasing reliance on imported gas. Energy production from coal fired power stations has increased since 2000 and now represents about one third of electricity production. Between 1997 and 2000, Labour blocked the construction of 15 gas-fired stations, which would have cut CO 2 emissions by 5.5 million tonnes a year.

The Government have also failed to deliver on renewable energy. They set a target for 10 per cent of overall energy use to be renewable by 2010, but it now stands at 3 per cent. They have put all their eggs in the wind farms basket and alienated many local communities, which have been bypassed in the planning process. They have neglected to stimulate the growth of other renewable technologies, such as tidal and wave power, in which Britain should have an obvious natural advantage. Even the Prime Minister revealed his own nimby instincts when he opposed a wind farm in Sedgefield.

Labour has failed the combined heat and power industry miserably. The target of producing 5 GW of energy by 2000, which was set by the Conservative Government in 1993, has only just been reached. Combined heat and power output fell between 2000 and 2003, and 64 CHP plants have been mothballed.

The Government have broken their pledge to assist the most vulnerable in eliminating the blight of fuel poverty. They have even reduced insulation standards in social housing, causing extra CO 2 emissions and leaving nearly 2 million people in cold homes and fuel poverty. The Government have piled unnecessary tax burdens and regulations on business, while failing to provide incentives to improve environmental performance. According to the CBI, environmental regulation costs business £4 billion a year in compliance. The CBI has also criticised too much environmental regulation as being

"badly designed and poorly implemented."

The Government have alienated the business community by failing to provide certainty and a secure framework of targets and objectives for long-term investment. The business community does not deny that it has a role to play but, if the targets and objectives are not clear, it is bad for everybody. Industry has looked for transparency, long-term certainty and fairness but has suffered from delay, vacillation, incoherence and short-termism.

The Government's notion of a green transport strategy is also called into question, because it seems to consist of trying to tax people out of their cars. Fiscal support for alternative fuels and cleaner cars has been so limited that the greenest fuels and cars still have less than 0.2 per cent of their respective markets. Meanwhile, aviation emissions have risen by 85 per cent since 1990 and are set to double again by 2020.

The Prime Minister has committed his Government and himself personally to lead the march towards a more sustainable world. He played a leading part at the United Nations Rio plus 5 conference in 1997, which led to the Kyoto agreement, and again at the world summit on sustainable development in 2002. Last April, he reaffirmed his commitment to, in his own words,

"the single most important issue that we face as a global community".

In a speech on climate change last September, he said that timely action to cut carbon dioxide emissions was essential to "avert disaster." During the speech, he cited the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution's report and the need to reduce emissions by 60 per cent by 2050, and stated:

"We are committed to this change."

However, the latest prediction from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is for a reduction of about 14 per cent in CO 2 emissions by 2010 on the basis of current policies. According to DEFRA's estimated emissions and removals of greenhouses gases on an IPCC basis, carbon emissions have risen for four years out of Labour's six years in power from 1997 to 2003, and emissions are 100,000 tonnes of carbon higher for the latest period for which figures are available than when Labour came to power. That is largely due to the continuing increase in the use of coal for electricity generation. Last February, the Government revealed that carbon dioxide levels had jumped by 1.5 per cent over the previous year.

Then we have seen the spectacle of a feud between DEFRA and the Department of Trade and Industry, involving the intervention of the Prime Minister, which has caused an unnecessary delay in the submission of our national allocation plan for the European emissions trading scheme, which started on 1 January 2005. A new plan was submitted requesting a more generous allowance in October 2004, but then the Prime Minister stepped in on the side of the DTI, which argued for a more generous base allocation. Meanwhile, the Commission has approved allocations for 9,108 installations in 21 member states, representing 4.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide over the period 2005–07. The Government have thus subjected business to delay and uncertainty. Will the Minister please explain to us what on earth they are up to in this row between DEFRA and the DTI over the national allocation plan?

On 16 January, The Observer revealed that the Government were secretly trying to have key commitments to long-term targets deleted from European documents. We have discussed those already. There is no doubt—I have the document in my hand—that the Government sought to delete the words:

"developed countries will need to reduce their aggregated greenhouse gas emissions by up to 60–80 per cent by 2050 compared to 1990 levels".

For the Minister to say "It is not removing the figures", which were his exact words, is frankly absurd. Will he take this opportunity to own up to that blunder and stop trying to pretend that Greenpeace knew all along exactly what the Government were doing and understood the Government's tactics? He must do better than that.

On 14 September 2004, the Prime Minister made a keynote speech on climate change, in which he reiterated that this was

"the world's greatest environmental challenge"

and said that it would be a "top priority" for Britain's presidency of the G8. He highlighted the three key parts of the Government's G8 strategy:

"First, I want to secure an agreement as to the basic science on climate change and the threat it poses. Such an agreement would be new and provide the foundation for further action.

Second, agreement on a process to speed up the science, technology, and other measures necessary to meet the threat.

Third, while the eight G8 countries account for around 50 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, it is vital that we also engage with other countries with growing energy needs".

So say all of us. However, it is notable that climate change or global warming did not feature in the Prime Minister's 2004 Labour party conference speech, and domestic measures to tackle this global problem did not form any part of his 10 priorities for a third term of Labour Government.

The Minister has implied that he did not think there was much in my comment about the environmental groups declaring war on the Government. That is certainly not true of Greenpeace, because Mr. Tindale said in The Independent in November 2004 that Mr. Blair's reheated, tub-thumping speeches on the world stage were undermined by his failed record in Britain. Tony Juniper, executive director of Friends of the Earth, pointed out that there was a gaping gap between the Prime Minister's rhetoric and leadership on the world stage and his record in the UK:

"The leadership position of this country is jeopardised by the position at home."

He went on:

"The credibility of this country on climate change is essentially derived from the policy choices taken by the Conservatives in the 1980s when they decided to shift from coal to gas generation".

Charles Secrett, former head of Friends of the Earth, who now heads Active Citizens Transform, said that Mr. Blair was

"all talk and no action".

He went on to say:

"Blair thinks he can get away with boosting his green credentials by making a big speech every year on climate change. It's always about the grand scenario and when it comes to putting his own house in order it is always business as usual."

I pay tribute to the Government's chief scientific adviser, Professor Sir David King, who will be retiring far too soon for our liking. In a recent interview, he talked about the imperatives for action and warned that measurements of atmospheric CO 2 taken at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii and published earlier this year showed that, while carbon levels had increased in recent years by an average of 1.5 parts per million annually, in 2002–03, the increase was more than 2 parts per million. Levels have risen so much that, according to Sir David:

"This is taking us up into relatively dangerous levels of CO 2 for our planet."

Anyone who is sceptical about the concept of climate change should listen to Sir David King. They do not need to look further than the Thames barrier. It was built to protect London from catastrophic floods and was used six times a year, not once every three to five years as planned. Sir David said:

"It's a damned good thing we put it up. A flood would knock out the City of London and cost about £30bn."

Quite so.

What would we do instead? Where are we coming from on this? We believe fundamentally in conservation of the past and preservation for the future. We have always supported the dual concepts of citizenship and duty as related to environmental stewardship and protection of the environment and countryside. Environmental goods and services are a common advantage and present generations should save and enhance such benefits for the good and security of future ones.

Conservatives do not see environmental protection and economic growth as mutually incompatible. We believe that market mechanisms can achieve sustainable development. We believe that excessive regulation may be bad for business but that targeted taxation and fiscal measures that provide industry with a long-term framework for investment are more likely to deliver environmental benefits. We support the proximity principle, which encourages localised decision making and local procurement. Local sustainable communities require and deserve more local empowerment and more local autonomy in decision making, such as over planning decisions.

We uphold the polluter pays principle. We acknowledge that pollution costs and hence we support life cycle costing—the internalisation of environmental costs in design, production, construction and operation. If products included the cost of pollution in their production, the marginal social cost would be higher. Thus, if all goods and services had to internalise their external environmental costs, only those most environmentally sensitive should succeed within the free marketplace. We would devise a policy framework to incentivise responsible consumption or the purchasing of environmental goods rather than environmental bads. The consumer should be able to make environmentally sensitive choices. Therefore, we support clear and coherent labelling of products to indicate the environmental consequences of design, production and distribution.

Conservatives are fully committed to the Kyoto process and the 2050 target for a 60 per cent. reduction in carbon emissions. We will pursue policies in government to achieve a 21st century world of resource efficiency and sustainable consumption in order to achieve climate stability.

Any Government must have the courage to consider all the options. They must look at scientific evidence, not scaremongering, for their policies. They cannot afford to resort to easy attention-grabbing fixes. To deal with climate change, Britain must become a low-carbon economy. It is the only option and we are committed to achieving that goal.