Climate Change

Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick Excerpts

Monday 24th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick (CB)]

My Lords, we are watching two very bizarre events at the same moment: the intense tragedy of people fleeing a burning Europe and trying, mid-holiday, to get out of a desperate place and survive, and the political shenanigans of the two main party leaders being equally indecisive about whether they believe climate change deserves intense heat action—lasering in on what must be the duties of government rather than just the short-term gains of a by-election.

I had responsibility for the climate reduction plan at one of the big four audit firms, with 200,000 people and 170 countries; I was head of corporate responsibility across KPMG. We met and achieved more than our target of 29% carbon reduction over 10 years—we achieved over 35%. That required one major action that I do not yet see contained in any government documents: a deep and detailed information and public awareness campaign for all the staff of the organisation, let alone their families and the public in the towns and cities in which we operated, to ensure that people understood the savage costs of inaction, the necessity of taking action and what that would cost each individual.

Just recently, we watched the end of Glastonbury—how fantastic! But the day after—in particular if you watched on the BBC, which covered it live—you saw literally millions of tonnes of deposited rubbish left behind after the final concert. People abandon carelessly and believe somebody else will take responsibility. This goes to the heart of our adaptive problem; we still do not believe that it is down to us. We still think it is about what government must do, but so much of it is about what I must do, what we must do, and the costs we must be aware of. Then people say, “You’re naive—we can’t afford to add cost burdens on our shopping and energy bills so that we can mitigate appropriately and adapt effectively”.

Given the Rhodes situation, I decided to check how many British adults and children are going on holiday in 2023. The figure will work out at just in excess of 53 million adults and children who will take overseas holidays in 2023. There were 49 million last year, and even in the year of Covid it was 8.2 million—how that happened is interesting, but never mind. The reality is that people can afford, in mass numbers, to undertake easy pleasures, but when it comes to affording the cost of responding to the cataclysmic crisis of climate change we are told that we cannot afford it. We can, but citizens will not be aware of that unless the Government make them aware. The Government were remarkable, in the multiple alliances—“a-lie-ances”—of deceit around Brexit, at telling everybody of all the great gains they would have, but now we wonder where anyone is. We must become serious about this issue. If public campaigning is not taken seriously, and if I do not realise what I am costing and what everyone is costing, we will continue to holiday at random and do nothing to change our behaviour.