COP 27: Commitments

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, I warmly congratulate the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, on securing this debate and on the very realistic assessment he has just given us. He has shown not only speed but agility in giving your Lordships’ House a chance to address the post-COP 27 situation so early. We will of course come back to it again and again, because all the issues are enormous and ongoing.

Outside, there has been a mild—or, more than that, a quite strong—feeling of disappointment at what came out of COP 27. But there was no surprise because, even before it got going, many people felt that the priorities remained wrong in relation to the serious issues that we face. I will quote the excellent chair of COP 26, Alok Sharma, who I believe will join us shortly in your Lordships’ House. As he said, there was no mention in the text of emissions peaking before 2025, and emissions of course continue to increase at a considerable rate, collectively. We are drifting further and further away from the Paris targets—this realism has to be faced if we are going to mobilise the right answers to the situation.

Alok Sharma added that there was no

“Clear follow-through on the phase down of coal.”


That is understandable, because Asia and Africa are driven largely by coal, and new coal stations are being constructed now. The proportion of electricity, or power generally, generated from coal across Africa and Asia is not decreasing, I am afraid; on the contrary, it is increasing. He also said that the text of the communiqué did not contain

“A clear commitment to phase out … fossil fuels.”


Again, that is a reflection of an ugly fact: 85% of the world’s energy still comes from fossil fuels. So, over two or three decades, we are talking about the most colossal undertaking in human history, far exceeding the industrial revolution or any other vast technological change in the past, to transform the world so that it no longer depends upon fossil fuels. It will take time and will have to be orderly, and just passing resolutions and putting them in texts is no contribution at all.

Most people rightly point to what is missing from all this. There are clearly some good things: the idea of a loss and damage fund to help those in real difficulty over climate change is obviously desirable, but it has to be formulated and organised. But everyone says, “Where’s the strategy? What is the grand strategy to meet this huge challenge to the stability of nations and the well-being of the 8 billion people, as we now are, on this planet?”

To my mind, the priorities are wrong on two levels. First, on our own contribution, which the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, mentioned, if you ask the experts what we in the United Kingdom are doing, the answer is, first, setting an example. I am always a little uneasy about that: if you talk to friends in Delhi, Beijing or anywhere in Asia, they do not seem to be taking much notice of our example. Still, we are trying and doing our best, and I do not deride that for one moment. The second answer is that we are aiming for net zero—for production, not consumption, because of course we continue to import massive amounts of carbon through our huge import facilities. Will that contribute much, given the size of the challenge? We produce about 1% of world carbon emissions; I am told that China produces in a week what we do in a year, so it is a very small pimple on this vast problem.

I am sure we could do much better in our contributions if we were more focused on what the issues really are. The issue is the ever-rising level of emissions from thousands and thousands of coal-fired stations, and thousands of other sources of carbon throughout Asia, owing to the size of the human race. If we are to make an effective contribution—more than just feeling we have done our bit with net zero—we will have to mobilise our technology and resources on a scale not contemplated since the wars of the past. Even they were on a smaller scale because we were talking about a far smaller world population and a far smaller problem in the world. We are now being called on to face up to the need to use our most brilliant talent and to make real sacrifices in the interests of curbing the ever-rising level of emissions.

I have long argued, as have many others, that the immediate national role that we can develop—I should like to hear how the Minister thinks we are getting on with this—is using our technological skill to reduce and cheapen considerably the methods of carbon capture, storage and usage. We should also cheapen the methods of installing those carbon-capture technologies in, as I said, thousands and thousands of smoking chimneys from coal-fired stations across the whole of the developing world, particularly in Asia and Africa, and using that to start curbing the main sources of emissions growth. That is where these emissions are really coming from. America is the biggest source—it may be getting some kind of grip on it now, although it has a long way to go—but the really fast-growing sources are India and China. We do not really know about the figures for Moscow. They say they are doing things and planting trees, but the net effects are not easy to see.

These areas are where we can really make a contribution, nationally, with our technological skill, but I am not convinced that we are doing that now. I am not convinced that the resources we are putting into NZ might not be better used for contributing the technology that will actually reduce climate emissions globally. It may not make us feel so good, but that is where the real impact can be made nationally.

Then we come to the wider world effort, and here the scene does fall short. As the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, rightly said, it falls very considerably short of what we should be achieving. We must bring a halt to, or start reducing, the parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere, now reckoned to be at the level of 422 parts. That is much too high—it must come down. The UNFCCC says that it must come down, our own Climate Change Committee says that it must come down and every expert says that it must come down. How can it be done? The answer is that we have to move on to a totally new area of innovation in carbon absorption: the direct extraction of carbon from the atmosphere on a scale not yet contemplated—and, alas, not discussed very much at Cairo.

This is where we should take a lead nationally, in a huge international effort to create the kind of schemes that Imperial College is now proposing: huge new carbon sinks and huge new ecosystems of every kind around the world, which can be developed. The first is now being suggested in Morocco. The noble and right revered Lord, Lord Harries, mentioned Morocco, as I did the other day; it can supply us with about 10 gigawatts—three or four nuclear power stations’ worth—of solar, low-carbon electricity in a few years’ time. More than that, it and other countries can provide huge desert areas in which new ecosystems can be built.

None of this was discussed, as far as I can make out, at all in Cairo. Therefore, I think the time has come for us to raise our game massively and to recognise that this is the biggest single move in the organisation of our planet since the Industrial Revolution. I saw a figure this morning that said it would require $100 trillion. I think that is far too high and we can do it for less, but we need innovation and ingenuity on a scale we did not see at Cairo. I hope, however, that in this nation we can at least point out the realities and raise our game.