Climate Change
Debate between Richard Tice and Pippa Heylings(1 month ago)
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Pippa Heylings
When a response to the letter comes back. Let us talk about the economics.
Richard Tice
It is an excellent idea to talk about the economics. The hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins) could not answer this simple question, but perhaps the hon. Lady can instead: when will the bills come down?
Pippa Heylings
The answer to that is in two ways. First, we must take gas out of the system as much as possible. Secondly, we must fix a broken electricity market. The way we charge customers and businesses right now is broken, and we need to change that. I do not believe in what happened under a previous Government, when George Osborne as Chancellor reduced taxation on oil and gas companies three times. By the end of that we had negative receipts to the Treasury, because we were also looking at decommissioning exemptions. Until some of the windfall tax profits came in, negative receipts were coming into the Treasury at that point.
If we talk about the economy, let us talk about the transition. As we have already heard, research from the CBI and the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit shows that the green economy is already contributing more than £100 billion and over 1 million new jobs. Clean power and decarbonisation are about growing our economy, creating those jobs, lowering energy bills and strengthening our energy security.
Although we welcome the carbon budget, setting targets is the easy part; delivering them is what counts. That is why we look forward to the Government’s delivery plan and seeing the steps that will be taken, because we worry that there is a risk they will fall short. The carbon budget will take much more than decarbonising our power supply and cannot be delivered in a centrist way from Whitehall alone. We Liberal Democrats want to see more action and ambition from this Government, not a focus on energy alone.
Emissions reductions will be experienced in people’s lives, and not just environmentally but economically, through changes in how homes are heated, how people travel and how energy is used. Local authorities, communities, farmers and businesses will be required to be partners in delivering change. We will have to double our efforts to restore nature, which is one of our most powerful tools for tackling climate change, by more generously supporting our farmers to accelerate tree planting and peatland restoration. But please, we should not treat nature protections as a blocker to economic growth. I ask the Government to get rid of the lazy, reckless rhetoric that divides climate and nature, rather than seeing them as indivisible necessities. We will also have to increase powers and funding for local authorities and communities to implement credible local climate and nature delivery plans.
Oil and Gas
Debate between Richard Tice and Pippa Heylings(4 months ago)
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Pippa Heylings
Let me turn to climate change. Although fossil fuels are driving skyrocketing costs, they also drive the costs of the unabated climate change that is already hitting our farmers and our communities, through crippling flooding and droughts. Approving Rosebank alone would add nearly 250 million tonnes of emissions, pushing us beyond our climate targets and further out of line with the Paris agreement, which aims to protect us all. Opening new fields would worsen the climate crisis without cutting bills or improving energy security. It would exacerbate climate breakdown, which is a national security threat that drives instability, displacement and economic shocks.
Richard Tice
The hon. Lady criticises us for trying to extract oil and gas, so does she also criticise Norway’s successful and excellent programme of drilling 49 new wells last year? We drilled none.
Pippa Heylings
We have been taking out less gas for decades now, and those decisions were taken by successive Governments. We have seen the assessment on the security of gas supply: Norway’s geological situation shows that it has more left, while our basin has less and the supply is dwindling. Expanding North sea drilling is not pragmatic; it is reckless and incompatible with the UK’s climate commitments.
There is another path, however. The Liberal Democrats have been clear that we must break our overdependence on fossil fuels and decouple gas and electricity prices so that households benefit from cheap, clean power. The more we expand renewable clean energy through contracts for difference—provision introduced by the Liberal Democrats—the less gas sets the price, so families and businesses could have fixed renewable energy prices. We would go further in taking policy costs off energy bills, so that households feel in their pockets that the wind and the sun are cheaper than gas. We must also make homes cheaper to heat in the winter, and cool in the summer, with a more ambitious warm homes plan and a 10-year emergency home upgrade programme.
We should build on the Liberal Democrat success by getting the Government to commit today to putting rooftop solar on all new builds. Rejoining the EU’s internal energy market would reduce wholesale costs, make the trade of energy more efficient, and avoid higher costs. More drilling means more volatility, more insecurity and higher bills. The Liberal Democrats offer a different path: decoupled gas and electricity prices, and the lower bills that families and businesses deserve.