Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill

Lord Hunt of Chesterton Excerpts

Monday 14th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marland]

I thank the noble Lord, my coalition colleague, for his kind remarks. I was rather heartened by the recent pictures that I saw in the papers of the effort being put in to saving the pelicans, although I do not know how true they are, because you can never believe everything you see in pictures. That effort has been paid for by someone, and I suspect that BP has a strong hand in ensuring that it takes place, because it is deeply committed to restoring the Gulf to where it was. New technologies will of course be looked at carefully. This demonstrates that the world is searching high and low for carbon-intensive energy, and we are moving towards scraping the barrel. As I said earlier, we have to accelerate our low-carbon development because this is a massive environmental wake-up call, so of course we will be looking at the new technology.

As I also said earlier, I think that the rhetoric and conversation between President Obama and our Prime Minister was exactly what one would want to hear following this recent tragedy, in that it was calm, sensible and not inflammatory, as has been reported. That is what is required in solving any problem.

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton]

My Lords, I think it would be as well to recall the remarks of the American ambassador for fisheries and oceans, Mr Bolton, who commented four years ago that many parts of the Gulf of Mexico were ecologically dead due to the vast quantities of nitrogen coming down the Mississippi. Enormous areas of that ocean are in a very bad state. I do not want to go into what is tiny or trivial; an integrated approach is important to the whole ecology of the Gulf of Mexico in the context of this accident and indeed other incidents. In the UK we have the Natural Environment Research Council, and I strongly recommend the Minister to get in touch with it. We have excellent scientists who are able to take an overall view and from that we can perhaps then get a more rational approach.

[Lord Marland]

My Lords, one of the great things about a debate such as this is that one learns so much. I am very grateful for the noble Lord’s comments on nitrogen flowing from the Mississippi; it is true that we have a very heavily polluted world. As I said earlier, if nothing else, I hope that this will be a massive environmental wake-up call, and I should like to take up the opportunity of meeting the noble Lord’s colleagues.