Energy Bill [HL]

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 12th December 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I support the thrust of these amendments but I also have huge qualms about hydrogen and electric vehicles. Quite honestly, electric vehicles still clog the roads and their drivers still run over and kill people. If we are thinking about low carbon, we should go for public transport.

I also want to quibble with the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, when she said that there was a lack of government leadership on this issue. The fact is that the Government are not giving us leadership on any issues. They are running around like a pack of confused ferrets. We are incredibly lucky that the whole of Britain is somehow hanging together and not having any disasters.

Returning to the amendments, something Greens are always very concerned about is marketisation and financial engineering around environmental issues. The UK has a long and dangerous track record of mismanaging this. In the same way that financial engineering around mortgages caused the 2008 financial crisis, there are risks that bankers will abuse the climate crisis as an opportunity to get filthy rich while destroying the very systems we are working to protect. It has been done before.

That is why we are concerned about concepts such as natural capital, which risks being a double-edged sword. If it helps policymakers to recognise the immense value of our natural capital and our natural world, it might be helpful, but if it simply creates new opportunities for bankers to get filthy rich, it is deeply dangerous.

For this reason, it is essential that carbon removals are genuine physical processes that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and lock it up. There cannot be any ambiguity or scope for financial markets to exploit for profit, or for our Government to claim success when no real carbon dioxide has been removed from the atmosphere.

I was at a round table last week; there were about 16 of us, and we were fairly evenly divided between scientists and parliamentarians. All the parliamentarians were from the Commons, apart from me. The scientists all agreed with each other and kept saying the same thing: that we must stop burning fossil fuels. However, all the parliamentarians, apart from me, said, “Oh, that’s quite difficult—I cannot ask my constituents not to fly”, and things like that. My concern is for the Government to be deeply behind the science. Even the UN is now saying that we must act urgently. You cannot, even now, talk about low carbon and net zero; we are past the point where they will have the impact that we need. Instead, we should be talking about carbon-negative measures. If the Government do not wake up to that very soon, I hope that we can replace them.

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, much has been said already. I agree with the main thrust of the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, which urges the Government to set out a very clear case for the decarbonisation of the various transport sectors. I do not think that we are there yet, and I do not think that the industry feels that we are there yet. It is important, for the reasons that the noble Baroness has just spelled out, that the transport sector knows which way it is going.

I must partially apologise to and reassure the Committee, because some of my speech was intended for the previous group of amendments. As noble Lords were making such commendable progress this afternoon, I did not get here in time to intervene on the amendment on home heating—an issue where, again, some clarity of decision is needed. Home owners and landlords are now faced with decisions on how to replace their gas boilers: they know they need to get rid of their gas boilers, but quite what they are going to get to replace them with is unclear. Of course, people replace their cars, and even their lorries and buses, rather more frequently than their houses and boilers. It is important, therefore, for the transport industry that there is some clarity on the general direction of government policy for the different sectors of transport.

On this topic, we immediately run up against the issue of hydrogen. I am not quite as sceptical as some of my colleagues, but I am sceptical, because hydrogen has been seen as a “get out of jail” card for almost every sector on their decarbonisation trails. That is not only for heavy industry, to replace the very heavily carbon-fuelled industries such as steel, glass and so forth, with its knock-on effect on the construction industry, et cetera, but for parts of the transport sector and for home heating. It has been seen by some as the solution to the decarbonisation of heavy vehicles, shipping, the train system and even aviation. However, hydrogen is not capable of doing that without safety dangers; and, in any case, it is not capable of doing that because we do not yet have the technology for producing green hydrogen at scale. Therefore, it will come in, if at all, only much further down the line. However, waiting for hydrogen—whether in the form of hydrogen blend for home heating or hydrogen-based vehicles or batteries for the transport sector—is seen as an excuse for not taking other technologies more seriously and urgently than we have done.

The amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, would require the Government to do that job for the transport sector. I think that they need to do that for other sectors as well, and that they should not exaggerate either the degree to which hydrogen is the solution or, in particular, the closeness of technological breakthroughs to provide genuinely green hydrogen. It is not going to happen in the kind of timescale that we are talking about. Therefore, the amendment has implications beyond transport, but transport itself needs a clear plan. I hope that the Minister will take up with his transport colleagues the need to work urgently, as the noble Baroness’s amendment urges, to ensure that the transport sector knows where it is going, even if nobody else does.

[Baroness Worthington (CB)]

My Lords, I am sorry to speak a second time—I am not sure whether I am allowed—but may I speak to Amendments 130A and 130B? In my excitement I forgot to speak to them. Those amendments in my name seek to address the carbon removals questions in the Bill.

Amendment 130A is to try to interrogate the Government’s amendments to the definitions of carbon removals, as stated in the Climate Change Act. My amendment would reinstate reference to forestry and other physical activities in the UK. I think this amendment is necessary because we do not want to see definitions used in the Climate Change Act, which are foundational to our understanding of what we need to do to tackle climate change domestically, to somehow allow vague processes such as the purchasing of offsets or some other financial instrument to be eligible for the net-zero accounting. I seek reassurances on that. I also seek reassurances that we acknowledge that forestry and land use need to be referenced alongside mechanical sinks to keep the system holistic and inclusive. So I am probing on those two questions: forestry and land use, and making sure we are talking about physical activity and not financial chicanery or accounting trickery.

I feel quite passionate about Amendment 130B. I am sure the UK will emerge as a world leader in this regard. If we are to become the centre of a market or set of policies that are economy-wide in decarbonising our system, we will have to get to grips with the MRV—the monitoring, reporting and verification of carbon removals—to get to a net-zero position. It is hugely important. When you burn a tonne of fossil fuel the impacts are certain and very low in error bars, but when it comes to the biospheric removal of carbon in particular, there are huge uncertainties and an absolute paucity of data. It really has not been looked at comprehensively enough, especially now that large sums of money may be resting on this approach to reaching net zero.

I urge the Minister and the department to really assess what the UK could do to set some gold-standard regulations regarding carbon removals. Let us start the debate with this Bill, pursue it and continue with it. Given that we are at the forefront of reaching these challenging carbon budgets that we have set ourselves, I have no doubt that carbon removals will have a role to play. But let us do it in a world-class way and not use it as a weasel-word excuse for allowing fossil fuels to continue, without the certainty that those removals are genuine, additional and permanent and can offset the almost permanent damage that we know occurs from the release of fossil fuels. It is hugely important that we do this. I tabled this as an opportunity to spark a debate, and I hope we will come back and consider it in more detail. The UK has a great potential role to play in this area.