Fourth Carbon Budget

Nia Griffith Excerpts

Tuesday 17th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Chris Huhne]

We are keen to engage community groups; the ministerial team does a lot of visits and makes sure that we are talking to members of civil society and, of course, to non-governmental organisations, which have an important influence on community groups. This is also particularly crucial in an area that I know can be controversial, even among those on the Government Benches: proposals for onshore wind. I think that that is a beautiful form of renewable energy, although I know that that opinion is not always shared across the House. It is an important part of our strategy to get community groups involved and owning these policies, and some interesting proposals have been made. For example, the biggest proposal for onshore wind is the Viking proposal for Shetland and it is half-owned by the community group that supports Shetlanders. So I am very much in favour of the sort of engagement that my hon. Friend has rightly suggested.

[Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)]

Given his comments today and previously, the Secretary of State is obviously keenly aware of the danger of carbon leakage, particularly if the Government proceed to reduce emissions through unilateral taxation on the energy-intensive industries. So what consideration has he given to an annual assessment of UK emissions on a consumption basis—an assessment taking into consideration imported goods—because that would act as a real incentive for us to reduce our emissions properly here in the UK?

[Chris Huhne]

The hon. Lady raises an important issue that people periodically talk about, which is that no matter how well we do in the UK, we are not making a difference to the world as a whole if we are merely outsourcing production of carbon-intensive goods to economies such as China. However, I would make two points in response, the first of which is that we should not underestimate the progress being made in economies such as India and China to grapple with and move very fast on this agenda. The Department and the Government are working with the low-carbon pilot areas in China and the developments are truly impressive, so I urge her to look at them. We are aware of this issue, but I do not think that any time soon we will be able to move globally towards a situation where we are taking into account the embedded carbon emissions in trade. The reality is that most of the nearly 200 countries that are members of the United Nations are fiercely protective of their own territorial sovereignty, so it seems likely that our major efforts to tackle climate change will be based on states’ control of their own territorial integrity.