COP 30

Lord Offord of Garvel Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd December 2025 Lords Chamber

The message coming out of Belém was clear: whatever the challenges, clean energy and climate action are the foundations on which the global economy is being remade and rebuilt. That is good for Britain because of the economic opportunities that clean energy represents. It is good for Britain because it is the route to energy security and lower bills. And it is good for Britain because it is the only way we can keep future generations safe from the threat of climate breakdown. I commend this Statement to the House”.

[Lord Offord of Garvel (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the Minister on his recent appointment and welcome him to the Front Bench. The Secretary of State in the other place is fond of talking of the United Kingdom as a trailblazer. As the shadow Secretary of State in the other place outlined, we are—but for all the wrong reasons. We are the first country to voluntarily close down our own domestic energy supply and to voluntarily hike our own energy bills. We are not an example to the world: we are a warning.

Since the COP summit, it seems that the department has started to come to its senses. Monday’s termination of a liquified natural gas project in Mozambique is a welcome step. It was a typically green initiative with a well-meaning façade that was, in practice, damaging, as LNG gas emits four times more carbon than the North Sea off our very shores. These overseas initiatives are used to prop up a narrative of reduced emissions while simultaneously causing more harm to the natural world, and they encompass a whole one-third of our energy system.

Sadly, the Secretary of State’s Statement demonstrates that he has not returned from Brazil enlightened and that the department is still bound by his damaging ideology. He cites three achievements that he came back with from the summit. The first was the commitment to continue cutting global emissions towards net zero, which he said needed to be achieved by 2050. It should be noted that the Statement also acknowledged that the UK accounts for just under 1% of global emissions. That number has in fact halved in the past 20 years. Does the Minister not agree that this proves that the United Kingdom has already played its part in the net-zero drive?

Unfortunately, this COP 30 achievement will undoubtedly now be used to justify the continuation of his campaign to wreak utter havoc on the North Sea industry. The tired old clichés of a declining basin will be the response of the Government, and we have come to expect this narrative. But let us examine the human cost: 1,000 jobs per month, companies drawing back from investing and energy bills spiralling. I draw noble Lords’ attention to north of the border, where the Government are responsible for destroying what remains of Scotland’s industrial base. Alexander Dennis, Mossmorran, Grangemouth: going, going, gone. Is it time to accept that we need to face the root cause of this deindustrialisation, namely high energy costs and the effects of government green diktats?

The second achievement that the Secretary of State trumpets is a commission to reduce emissions through working with the finance industry. Again, this achievement will not benefit the British people. Investment will not be channelled into reducing bills. The Government’s team returned from Brazil with a pledge to scale up funding for developing countries to $1.3 trillion. It is internationalism at the expense of the British people.

The Statement mentioned nothing of the £60 billion investment required to build energy infrastructure in our own country to meet the Government’s artificially hastened 2030 net-zero target for the electricity grid, and nothing of the £3 billion annual government policy cost to turn off the wind farms.

There was nothing on the investment desperately needed in our nuclear sector. Cutting emissions is a noble aim, but the Government are undertaking it in a haphazard and ideologically blinkered manner, all to the detriment of the British people.

Thirdly, there is the announcement of not one but two road maps: one to cut fossil fuels and one to cut deforestation. The Government already have a road map to cut fossil fuels. In fact, John Fingleton’s nuclear report was published last Monday. The Government seemed to have accepted the recommendations on Monday, but let us see if that translates into a policy U-turn. Will the Minister outline to the House the timetable for the implementation of the Fingleton recommendations in legislative terms?

I offer the same argument for the deforestation road map. One of the primary drivers of nature depletion in the UK is a sprawl of solar and wind farms across our countryside. If the Government want to put a halt to deforestation, it could begin at home. This unfortunately means moving away from the endless expansion of solar. The Government cannot have it both ways. Once again, they need to build more nuclear.

This summit and the Secretary of State’s Statement will, unfortunately, do nothing to help British people with the exorbitant cost of energy, where our industrial energy prices are seven times those of China and four times those of the US. Even if wholesale energy prices halve in the next five years, electricity bills will still be £200 higher per household. That is the direct cost of government policy. No number of multilateral commitments will ease that burden. Only a radically different approach to energy and a comprehensive plan for cheap energy will take us forward.

[Earl Russell (LD)]

My Lords, I start by welcoming the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Whitehead. I pay tribute to his experience and look forward to working opposite him going forward.

COP is 30 years old and multilateralism, as frustrating as it can be, remains the only practical means of protecting our shared home, planet Earth, and progressing our joint efforts to ensure the survival of future human generations. Here in the UK, the Met Office’s State of the UK Climate in 2024 report confirmed that the UK is warming at approximately 0.25 degrees per decade, with the past three years ranking among the five warmest since records began in 1884. While some continue to deny the existence of climate change, last year in the UK we had the worst-ever wildfire season and the second-worst harvest on record.

Our world is warming faster than we can change our carbon-based ways, and even more extreme weather is inevitable. I thank Brazil, the Secretary of State, the UK negotiating team and all those who worked tirelessly to keep the COP process alive. It is testimony to global co-operation that, despite the challenges, 194 parties united to adopt the text, confirming that the global transition towards low emissions and climate-resilient development is irreversible.

It is important to acknowledge that collective progress since the Paris Agreement has bent the emissions curve, moving projected warming from over 4 degrees Celsius to the 2.3 to 2.5 degrees Celsius range. However, we cannot celebrate incremental progress when the future of our planet remains in jeopardy.

The final text acknowledged that the collective progress is

“not sufficient to achieve the temperature goal”

and that the carbon budget consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is now small and being rapidly depleted. The COP text acknowledges that there is likely to be an “overshoot” of the 1.5 degrees Celsius, the extent and duration of which we must work collectively to limit. This is a stark warning and my concern is that Governments have failed to grasp the urgency of the climate emergency.

Any delay in action will push millions of vulnerable people further into poverty and lead to climate breakdown. Urgency must be met with decisive global leadership, yet the UK Government’s commitment to this leadership has been undermined by a lack of financial support. While the negotiations resulted in ambitious financial targets, such as the call to scale up financing to at least $1.3 trillion per year by 2025 and the reward target to scale up and at least triple adaptation finance by 2035, the UK’s financial contributions failed to materialise.

The UK was acknowledged for working with Brazil to help it develop the pioneering Tropical Forest Forever Facility. This vital fund aims to prevent deforestation, yet while that fund secured $9.5 billion in commitments and was endorsed by 53 countries, the UK Government did not contribute. I note that the Secretary of State said in the other place:

“We have not ruled out contributing to investing in the TFFF in future”.—[Official Report, Commons, 25/11/25; col. 247.]


We hope this is the case. Will the Minister say what non-financial contributions the Government are able to make?

We remain concerned about the UK’s official development assistance and the cuts to those programmes. They are vital programmes helping those on the front line of climate change to adapt. Global leadership could see the UK as part of the chair of the Climate and Clean Air Coalition, working alongside Brazil, and using remote monitoring to help detect methane leaks and using our world-leading oil and gas expertise to help fix them.

The Government rightly acknowledge that the transition away from fossil fuels is critical, and that it was

“the hardest sticking point in the talks”.—[Official Report, Commons, 25/11/25; col. 241.]

Despite a broad coalition of 83 countries backing a road map away from fossil fuels, the final text tragically contained no explicit reference to the phase-out. At home, we welcome the commitment to no new oil exploration in the North Sea. More must be done to bring about energy market reforms, reduce energy bills and insulate our homes urgently. Many parliamentarians, including me, attended the National Emergency Briefing on the climate and nature crisis last week, which called for an emergency-style Marshall plan. I call on the Government to engage with and take heed of these calls for urgent, sustained action.