COP 27: Commitments

Lord Birt Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, I applaud, as I am sure all other noble Lords will, the manifest expertise of the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington—an example of the House of Lords at its best. I also of course welcome the noble Lord, Lord Leong, and congratulate him on his maiden speech. I hope he will carry the ideas of this place into not just the United Kingdom but the wider world.

It was one step forward in Glasgow, but I fear more than one step back at Sharm el-Sheikh. While we should not forget that emissions across the G20 are in general decline, in four countries—China, India, Indonesia and Russia—they have massively increased in the 10 years since 2010 and, importantly, continue to grow. In spite of the melting glaciers, the unfreezing of the tundras, the calamitous floods, the raging forest fires and the ever more blistering temperatures, a permissive approach to hydrocarbons crept back on to the agenda at the very last moment at Sharm el-Sheikh, demonstrating that the global battle of ideas is not yet won. However, as others have touched on, Alok Sharma’s passionate and punchy riposte at the very conclusion of the conference demonstrated that the fight is still very much on.

Present the will, all nations can achieve net zero. Take the progress the UK has made in the past quarter-century in massively reducing the role of coal in electricity generation and incentivising the switch towards renewables. In the eight years between 2012 and 2020, UK territorial emissions of CO₂ dropped by 30%. It can be done.

With 40% of Europe’s share of north Atlantic wind blowing hard across the UK, continuing investment at scale in offshore wind offers us an easy and cost-effective opportunity and commands wide assent. However, I do not think that we should save the planet by bespoiling our part of it. Some land sites are perfectly appropriate, but there are areas of our unusually beautiful country that need to remain unspoiled. A couple of months ago, I walked the Cumbrian Way with my wife, right through the heart of the Lake District from south to north. It is one of the most glorious landscapes on earth, but I did not welcome the sight of a wind farm at its gateway.

We all understand that renewables are intermittent and that nuclear has a key role to play in offering a carbon-free baseload on the national grid. But we do need to speed up. I was working at No. 10 in 2005 when the decision to rekindle the nuclear programme was made, yet Hinkley C will not be commissioned until 2027, more than two decades later. What about Sizewell C? Three decades later? Our inability as a country to deliver major infrastructure projects expeditiously has become a national malaise. Our can-do 19th-century forefathers turn in their graves.

As to next steps, as a country we have recently been far quicker to sign up to bold and welcome net-zero targets than to explain how we shall meet them. The challenges ahead are certainly far harder than those faced hitherto. Various technologies such as green hydrogen and carbon capture and storage have their energetic champions, but their economics as yet remain uncertain, as some excellent but largely ignored analytical work on hydrogen by BEIS officials demonstrates.

I am the owner of an electric vehicle and have direct experience of the perils of charging. Can the Minister say when the Government will set out a comprehensive, coherent framework defining the route map towards easy access to charging—wherever you travel or live, whether in a tower block, a terraced street or a remote village—and the responsibilities and accountabilities for delivering that? When I installed a charger at my village home, the engineer joked that I was lucky that I was the first in the village to do so, as there was as yet insufficient power for a second. Where is the plan to upgrade our local electricity distribution networks?

When will the Government define the road map towards decarbonising the heating of homes and buildings? With the oldest housing stock in Europe, only a tiny fraction of which is insulated, and with heat-pump technologies slow to build up heat and produce a comfortable ambient temperature in winter, how will we incentivise the decarbonisation of heating homes and buildings? What will we do about our vast current dependency on gas? By what multiple will we have to increase electricity generation as a country over the coming decades, and how?

I do not underestimate for one minute the difficulty of these challenges. They would be enormous for any Government. However, can the Minister explain the mechanism—I presume it is in the Cabinet Office, and I do not mean a Cabinet sub-committee—for plotting the optimum route to net zero for the UK and for marshalling the many departments across Whitehall that need to combine effectively if that target is to be achieved and delivered? The prize is to be one of the countries showing the way, for the benefit of everyone on earth and our and their grandchildren.