Paris Climate Change Conference

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

Thursday 19th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Helen Goodman]

It is good to remove coal—there is no contention about that—but it would be better to replace it with more solar and more wind. That is the simple proposition I am making.

[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for taking this frenzy of interventions. One thing she has not so far said—she must forgive me if I am not completely au fait with His Holiness’s utterances on this subject—is whether he mentions investment in technology. Surely the lesson of the history of humanity is that science has broadly solved pretty much all our problems when they have presented themselves to us.

Some significant technologies are a little starved of Government investment across the world. I have a particular enthusiasm for the fuel cell and the hydrogen economy that will, I hope, replace the carbon economy in my lifetime as one that is less damaging to the planet. Does she agree that perhaps one thing we should do at the Paris summit is to agree—much as we have on dementia, for instance—that global action on investment in technology and science can solve these problems as much as behavioural change can, not least with the hydrogen economy at the forefront of global considerations, as many countries are now realising?

[Helen Goodman]

The hon. Gentleman makes a reasonable point. Of course we need new technologies. One of the problems at the moment is that people trying to invest in new technologies—for example, big battery storage technologies—cannot get funding. They cannot even get them funded by the UK Green Investment Bank. I do not think it is very helpful to privatise the Green Investment Bank when that is the case, or to change the policy framework, which means that we will lose the clarity, simplicity and confidence that industry needs in order to plan its investment over the medium term. We cannot just switch this on and off like the lights; we need to think about it decades ahead.

[Kit Malthouse]

I am sorry to repeat myself, but that was broadly my point. I was trying to make the point about the Paris conference that, as much as the hon. Lady says the emphasis should be on an agreement about behavioural change by business and industry, there should be a global agreement on investment in exactly the technologies that she says are starved of money. That might mean the Government having to make up for a market failure by investing in them to a certain extent. Nevertheless, as she says, given that we need a decadal view—out to when my grandchildren will be born—such investment needs to put in now. It may be that that has to be paid for out of the global public purse.

[Helen Goodman]

The hon. Gentleman is right that we need to have intelligent investment in technology, but I want to draw him back to paying a little attention to the Pope’s encyclical. An over-reliance and an over-optimism about technical fixes when we do not know whether they will actually work has encouraged us to consume too much and to be too destructive. We need to keep such things in the balance as we develop policy.