Geo-engineering and the Environment

Pippa Heylings Excerpts

Monday 23rd June 2025 Westminster Hall

[Pippa Heylings (South Cambridgeshire) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Furniss.

It is important to set the debate and the e-petition in the context of the last couple of weeks. Last weekend saw another hottest day of the year on record, triggering an official heatwave and accompanied by an amber heat health warning, which means that because of high temperatures significant impacts are likely across health and social care services, including a rise in deaths, particularly among those aged 65 and over and people with health conditions. The Met Office puts the chance of us seeing another 40° weather event at 50:50, with a 45° day on the cards in the current climate. That is like an average summer day in Death Valley. I cannot imagine how the people and the natural environment in my constituency or the rest of the UK could cope with that.

As well as record-breaking temperatures, the weekend brought an increase in the threat of greater destabilisation in the middle east, with escalating conflict between Israel and the US and Iran. Unsurprisingly, on Sunday night oil prices soared to their highest since President Trump’s return to office, as the energy markets digested the news of the attacks on nuclear facilities in Iran. We do not yet know whether the situation in the middle east will lead to an oil supply shock. The Iranian Parliament has threatened to close the strait of Hormuz, which would choke the flow of oil from the region. Ordinary people will once again face volatile prices, hitting their pockets, as energy becomes more expensive and the cost of living is exacerbated.

Over just one weekend, we have seen our vulnerability to extreme weather conditions as a result of our failure to tackle climate change, and our vulnerability as a result of our dependence on global fossil fuels supply and prices. That underlines, once again, our need to strengthen our home-grown energy security and reduce our polluting emissions by accelerating investment in renewables and clean, green energy. Our emissions are not falling fast enough, and we are not on track to meet our legally binding climate targets. The world is set to surpass 1.5° of warming in the next decade. That is the context in which the petition was brought forward.

We need to address the root causes of climate breakdown, as my hon. Friend the Member for South Cotswolds (Dr Savage) said. The Climate Change Committee was clear last year that only a third of the emissions reductions required to achieve the country’s climate targets are currently covered by credible plans. Although it is true that our emissions are now less than half the levels they were in 1990, largely due to the phase-out of coal and the ramping up of renewables, we will now need ambitious action not just in the energy sector but across transport, buildings, industry and agriculture. The plans left by the previous Government did not deliver enough action, so we must do more. Nevertheless, even with aggressive investment in renewables and actions to decarbonise key sectors, we will still have to deal with residual emissions from heavy industries, particularly aviation, shipping and steel.

The balanced pathway, developed in the Climate Change Committee’s seventh carbon budget, tries to reduce emissions across all sectors of the economy as far as credibly possible, in line with cost effectiveness and feasibility constraints, minimising the use of engineered removals. However, even the committee recognises that we need to go beyond cutting emissions and to start work on the engineered removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. That is why removals are part of the Government’s net zero strategy.

As we have heard, geo-engineering refers to deliberate, large-scale projects to reduce carbon and cool the Earth’s climate system to address climate change. In greenhouse gas removal terms, that also includes direct air carbon capture and storage and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, some of which we are already using. We have seen sizeable investments from the Government into carbon capture storage. That could accommodate large-scale BECCS and DACCS, which clearly will be dependent on carbon capture and storage, but that is a measure of last resort for those hard-to-decarbonise sectors.

Living in South Cambridgeshire, I am close to the border with Cambridge. Since 2019, under climate expert Professor Sir David King, the University of Cambridge has been undertaking some important research into greenhouse gases at the Centre for Climate Repair. Among other things, it has been looking at something that brings climate and nature approaches together into balance again, such as marine biomass regeneration, which aims to restore whale populations, and ocean biomass to boost nutrient recycling and phytoplankton growth, because healthier oceans can naturally absorb more carbon dioxide and support global climate goals.

The centre has also been looking at the role of giant kelp, which grows rapidly and captures large amounts of carbon dioxide. When it sinks to the ocean floor, it stores carbon for the long term, offering a powerful, nature-based carbon removal method. Those are just two of the types of approaches that are being investigated. Quite rightly, the Government funded an independent review of greenhouse gas removal approaches, led by former MP Dr Alan Whitehead, covering nature-based solutions and engineered removals, such as direct air capture.

We saw in the Government’s response to the e-petition that they are currently working with the British Standards Institution to develop greenhouse gas removal methodologies, some of which may use sustainable biomass and require coming up with biomass sustainability criteria. There are some ways in which we could see greenhouse gas removal as a kind of guardrail for helping to decarbonise the atmosphere.

The e-petition also makes reference to solar radiation modification, which is an area that causes more concern. The Government have announced that they are not in favour of using SRM and have no plans for its full deployment. That position was made clear by the Minister in January, who said that the ongoing SRM research is for modelling only. The Government’s views on SRM are in accordance with those of the Liberal Democrats; we think it should not go to full deployment. We also think that the money invested in SRM research could have been better allocated to other measures for dealing with nature-based removal. I agree with Professor Mike Hulme that the cost of the research is an extraordinary amount of taxpayer money to invest in speculative technology. He is right to say, as I have already said, that the money could be better spent on reducing our dependence on fossil fuels or removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Geo-engineering is not a silver bullet. It must never be used as an excuse to delay decarbonisation through embracing and investing in renewables. We must remember that the first stop in our fight against climate change and securing energy security is investment in the transition to renewable and clean energy. Any amount of greenhouse gas removal will ultimately compromise the fight against climate change. As Dr Vaughan from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change said:

“SRM methods do not address the causes of climate change”.

However, a blanket ban on geo-engineering, as the motion proposes, would be short-sighted and self-defeating as we explore the other methods that I have discussed. Let us therefore champion governance built on transparency for any kind of research and standards in geo-engineering and climate action, which is ambitious and grounded in our transition to home-grown clean, green energy.