Earl Cathcart
Main Page: Earl Cathcart (Conservative - Excepted Hereditary)
Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan
If the Government are satisfied that they and their predecessors have done everything they could since 2005 to achieve a reduction of 30 grams per kilowatt hour, they are content with very little.
We are not asking the companies to do anything. They have already provided the information and it is clear that they are not pursuing decarbonisation with the enthusiasm and vigour that the Committee and the House want them to. It is therefore surprising that the Minister should be so complacent about this. She is suggesting that she will do no more than is being done at the moment: that the European directive will take out coal eventually and, once it does, we will have reached the sunlit uplands and everything will be fine. I shall withdraw the amendment but I think that when the Minister reads this she will be embarrassed because she is coming out with some fairly complacent stuff.
The major players have not been performing as well as they should have been and should be pushed harder. The Government have the information and the means of consultation to secure realistic targets, which would not be crippling but would be a great deal better than the, in effect, 1% per annum improvement that we have enjoyed over the past five or six years.
Earl Cathcart
I genuinely do not understand this. I can understand Europe wanting to get rid of coal altogether, but how is it that the Germans are planning to build 20 more coal-fired power stations? I do not understand how they will get away with it if the Europeans are going to get rid of coal altogether.
Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan
I am merely quoting what the Minister said. As a consequence of, for example, the large plant directives, our dependence on coal-fired generation will contract to a great extent. The Germans have created a number of problems for themselves and, in some respects, hell mend them. They have turned their back on nuclear power in a petulant and immature manner and they are now trying to resolve problems of generation in a situation where they have the wind in the north, the demand in the south and nothing in between.
Coal may well be an issue but I do not think that they will satisfy the regulations without CCS, which is still a pipe dream in many respects. It is one that we wish to pursue and, I hope, achieve, but for the next 10 years it will be a gleam in the eye of a few technologists and nothing else.
We are not asking the Government to do anything that they do not already do. It begs the question whether, were it not for a European directive, they would be collecting this information in the first place. They do not seem to be doing anything with it. It is there gathering dust and I do not understand the point of collecting it. It might be better to try to rescind the directive and say, “Let’s get this burden away from the companies. We do not need the information, we do not do anything with it and we are not going to use it to encourage them to reduce their emissions”.