Climate Change Act 2008 (2050 Target Amendment) Order 2019

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Wednesday 26th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Lord Henley) (Con)]

My Lords, two weeks ago, in laying this order, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy made a Statement in another place, subsequently repeated here, setting out the Government’s ambitions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from a target of at least 80% to 100%. This draft order does just that by seeking to amend the Climate Change Act. The target, otherwise known as net zero, will constitute a legally binding commitment to end the UK’s contribution to climate change.

I note the attention the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee has drawn to this draft order, specifically on the economic and wider societal implications. I thank the committee for its review of the order and will address these points in my speech. However, first I will set out the case for action.

Last year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its report on the impact of global warming at 1.5% above preindustrial levels. In that report it made it clear that a target set to limit global warming to 2% above preindustrial levels was no longer enough. It made it clear that by limiting warming to 1.5%, we may be able to mitigate some of the effects on health, livelihoods, food security, water supply, human security and economic growth—

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My noble friend mentions “2%” and “1.5%”. Surely, he means 2 degrees centigrade and 1.5 degrees centigrade above preindustrial levels?

[Lord Henley]

My noble friend is absolutely correct. I should have said 1.5 degrees centigrade and 2 degrees centigrade, and I am grateful for that correction.

The panel made it clear that countries across the world, including the UK, need to do more.

The House has heard of the great progress we have made in tackling climate change; of how we have cut emissions—on this occasion I will correctly give a percentage—by 42% since 1990, while growing the economy by 72%; of how we have cut coal from 40% of our electricity generation to less than 5% in just six years; and of our leadership role in sectors from offshore wind to green finance. That progress has been delivered by parties across this House and by communities across the UK. But we know that this is only the start and that we need to do more. That is why we commissioned our expert independent advisers, the Committee on Climate Change, to see if we should, and could, go further than our 80% target and set a target for achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions. On 2 May the committee responded.

In its report, the committee has told us, quite clearly, that ending the UK’s contribution to global warming is now within reach. It has advised that a net zero emissions target is necessary, because climate change is the single most important issue facing us; feasible, because we can get there using existing technologies and approaches, enabling us to continue to grow our economy and to maintain and improve our quality of life; and affordable, because it can be achieved at a cost equivalent to 1% to 2% of GDP in 2050. Due to falling costs, this is the same cost envelope which Parliament accepted for an 80% target back in 2008. That is before the many benefits, from improved air quality to new green-collar jobs, are taken into account.

The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee drew particular attention to the economic and societal impacts of this transition. While this statutory instrument does not in itself place a direct burden on any other body than central government, it is right that we understand how to meet the costs of this transition in a fair and balanced way. That is why the Treasury will be taking forward a review on how to achieve this transition in a way that works for households, businesses and public finances. The review will also consider the implications for UK competitiveness. We provide full impact assessments when we set carbon budgets and will continue to do so for the sixth carbon budget when that is set.

In its report, the Committee on Climate Change made it clear that 2050 is the right year for this target and is the appropriate UK contribution to the Paris agreement; it does not currently consider it credible for the UK to aim to reach net zero emissions earlier than 2050. I thank the Committee on Climate Change for the quality, breadth and analytical rigour of its advice.

Recent months and weeks have been a time of huge and growing interest in how we tackle the defining challenge of climate change. Calls for action have come from across society, and we all know that in doing this, it is important that we take people with us. My message today is that we have listened and we are taking action.

This country has long been a leader in tackling climate change. Thirty years ago, the then Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher was the first global leader to acknowledge at the UN,

“what may be early signs of man-induced climatic change”.

Eleven years ago, Parliament—under a different Government, of a different hue—passed the ground-breaking Climate Change Act, the first legislation in the world to set legally binding long-term targets for reducing emissions. That Act, passed with strong support from all sides of both Houses, created a vital precedent on climate: listen to the science; focus on the evidence; pursue deliverable solutions. Today I believe that we can make history again as the first major economy in the world to commit to ending our contribution to global warming. I ask the House to come together today in the same spirit to support this draft legislation.

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[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chair of the Woodland Trust and I welcome the Government’s commitment to net zero carbon as enshrined in this instrument. I will make two very brief points. First, to reach this target, we have to move away from fossil fuels—I commend in that regard the noble Baroness’s speech immediately prior to mine—but we also have to undo some of the damage already done. One way to do that on a large scale is to plant more trees. Trees eat atmospheric carbon for breakfast. The Committee on Climate Change has called for a 9% increase in tree cover in this country. If that is to be done in the next 12 and a half years, which is the deadline calculated by the IPCC for having any hope of keeping temperature rises to below 1.5 degrees, it means 74 million trees a year. The Government’s current target is 11 million trees in the five-year lifetime of this Parliament—although who knows what that is going to be? In reality, in the past six months the Government have not even met their own target. According to figures kindly provided by Defra, government action resulted in the planting of fewer than 500,000 trees in the past six months. That is a long way off the rate required.

I recognise that the Government have now put in place some £60 million of additional funding for tree planting in the interests of combating climate change, but that is still not enough. The amendment is therefore fully justified. We need rapid clarity on how the target will be delivered. Unless planting rates are increased 50-fold, the tree element of the CO₂ reduction plan will simply fail. It can be done and it will have huge additional benefits, for biodiversity as well as a range of human health and resilience effects, reduction in heat, water resource protection, flood risk management and air quality improvement. So it is worth doing, it is effective, but it needs to be done faster. The Government’s commitment is admirable in principle, but it needs urgent practical action in the next 12 years, and not by 2050, if the impact of tree planting is to have results. So I commend the comment of the noble Lord, Lord Deben, about just doing it.

I make this comment to critics of the target. We are not doing ourselves a service by being mealy-mouthed about the costs of doing nothing. I understand entirely why the climate change committee has taken a conservative approach and does not want to try to estimate the costs of not hitting the target. But the reality is that we do not need to do that; we simply need to ask the insurance industry globally. It has recognised the impact of floods, of heat, of ecosystem destruction, and the impacts on agriculture. It is already paying out for those effects. Ask the insurance industry if you are in any doubt about whether the investment that we are envisaging is worth while.

[Viscount Ridley]

My Lords, I declare my interests in coal but also in renewable energy—wind and wood in particular. I am genuinely shocked by the casual way in which the other place nodded through this statutory instrument on Monday, committing future generations to vast expenditure to achieve a goal that we have no idea how to reach technologically without ruining the British economy and the British landscape. We are assured without any evidence that this measure will have,

“no significant … impact on business”—

but where is the cost-benefit analysis on which this claim is based? Where is the impact assessment? They do not exist. We are told that the Treasury will run exercises in costing the proposals after we have agreed them, but that is irrational. Who among us in our private life says, “Yes, we’ll sign a contract to buy a house, and only after the ink on the purchase is dry will we try to find out the price of the house”?

We are faced with a measure which is likely to cost at least £1 trillion on top of the £15 billion a year that we are now spending on subsidies to renewable energy. Let us remind ourselves just how big a sum £1 trillion is. If you spent a pound a second, it would take you 30,000 years to get through £1 trillion. You would have had to start before the peak of the last Ice Age, when woolly mammoths and Neanderthals roamed across the tundra where we now sit. Now we are talking about spending £1,000 a second for the next 30 years.

The Committee on Climate Change says that the cost will be even higher. It assumes that UK GDP will have almost doubled, from about £2 trillion to about £3.9 trillion a year by 2050, and that we will have been spending 1% to 2% of GDP every year between now and then. That means that we will have spent between £30 billion and £60 billion a year for 30 years: a total of £900 billion to £1.8 trillion. That number has been described in this debate as “manageable” and “affordable” by the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester. It has been described as “nickel and dime” by the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington. But hang on a minute—where does the Committee on Climate Change get the estimate of 1% to 2% of GDP?

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I wonder who wrote that—it is quite beautiful—and I wonder what has happened to the Conservative Party in the meantime. You are really not measuring up to Margaret Thatcher.

[Viscount Ridley]

The noble Baroness will be aware, because she will have read Charles Moore’s excellent biography of Margaret Thatcher, that she later resiled from those views—on climate change specifically, not on other environmental issues—and said that, yes, the problem was exaggerated.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb]

Yes, I am well aware that all politicians can get it wrong at various times, and she was wrong there.

What has happened to the Conservative Party in the meantime? We have a Government who resist onshore wind installations, which would supply cheap, clean energy, while supporting dirty, expensive fracking. Fracking is not the answer: it is a way to pump more fossil fuels into the atmosphere and, in the process, allow a rapacious private company, Cuadrilla, to stifle legitimate, peaceful protest. The Government push a steep VAT increase—from 5% to 20%—for new solar battery systems while coal remains at a discounted rate, and propose a third runway at Heathrow and more roadbuilding. We seem to be in a topsy-turvy world where the Government do not understand what is happening.

At the same time, three children—three climate protesters—from the Albany Academy, are being punished for attending the youth strike for climate protests. Children fighting for their future is not a crime. A brave planet protector, Angie Zelter, has been in court this week for protesting with Extinction Rebellion. She says:

“I cannot really understand why those in power have refused to act. After all, it is their world, too”.


It is noble Lords’ world, too. Many will have children and grandchildren who will be massively affected by this issue. I wish noble Lords over there would be a little quieter. Is that possible?

Fine words are not enough to fight erratic weather patterns that cause disasters in rich and poor countries. They are not enough to clean our rivers and seas of plastic pollution, to clean our polluted air, to save the curlew and the red squirrel up north, and certainly not enough to guarantee supplies of clean water, uncontaminated food and to resist global economic collapse. Can we please have some policies that will make a difference? As the protesters outside are saying, the time is now.

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[Lord Lilley]

My recollection is the words, “look at the cost, and in particular the distribution”, which seems sensible. I endorse both aspects of my noble friend’s appeal to the Treasury.

[Viscount Ridley]

Does my noble friend agree that the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee report on this order says:

“It would have been helpful for the Department to provide a summary of the work that is underway to assess the significant costs and wider impacts of the transition, to inform Parliament’s scrutiny of the instrument”?

[Lord Lilley]

Absolutely. That is what we ought to do in this House: look closely at these things. That does not mean to say we reject them. Unless we know the cost of this measure, which is potentially enormously costly, we are really buying a pig in a poke. I hope the House will focus on that point: should we go ahead and pass this without an impact assessment, or should we at least demand that the Treasury comes forward with such an impact assessment and a distributional assessment as soon as possible?

That distributional assessment is important, because these measures tend to fall disproportionately on low-income households. We have seen that in any country where the cost of climate change measures has come into political contention, those on modest incomes have tended to vote against them. We saw it in Australia and Canada; we have seen the gilets jaunes in France. We should beware and be aware that we are imposing large costs on ordinary households, and we should not go ahead and do that lightly and without knowledge of the figures.

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The next question is a big one.

[Viscount Ridley]

I am most grateful to my noble friend the Minister and apologise for intervening. Can he address my point about why the Committee on Climate Change has not shown in sufficient detail its workings in arriving at this figure of 1% to 2% of GDP?

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I have mentioned the Treasury review, which will be available when it comes out in due course, but that question is a matter for the Committee on Climate Change, which is independent. The committee will no doubt—I hope—consider my noble friend’s request and make that information available to him.

The second big topic I want to address in the limited time for which I feel the House will tolerate my speaking is the beginning of the question of how. I have made clear that the energy White Paper will come forward later in the summer. At this point, I have to say that, if noble Lords can be a little patient, there will be more to come before the House and more to hear. There have been accusations that, although we have met the first three carbon budgets, we are not on track to meet the fourth and fifth. We are over 90% of the way to the fourth and fifth carbon budgets, even before many of the policies and proposals in the clean growth strategy have had an opportunity to bite. But we recognise that there is a need to take further action and we are delivering that.

I shall give a few examples. I am thinking about complaints from my noble friend Lord Deben about housebuilding standards and a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Fox. The future homes standard provides that new-build homes will be future-proofed with low-carbon heating and world-leading levels of energy efficiency by 2025. We have published the carbon capture and utilisation action plan. We have announced £60 million for the next contracts for difference auction. But I note the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, about the offshore wind sector deal, which she has championed. She also very kindly mentioned the fact that I had spent lunchtime—and missed my lunch—addressing that conference, but I still had time to come here and deal with this important business. I am grateful for having had the opportunity to do so. We have also increased support for the transition to zero-emission vehicles to nearly £1.5 billion.

We are doing a lot; there is more to do. The order is about legislating to end our contribution to one of the most serious environmental challenges we face: climate change. We aim to be one of the first countries and one of the first major economies—if not the first G7 country—in the world to legislate for that net zero target. I believe we are doing, and achieving, a great deal. I do not believe that the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, takes us any further. In fact, it is an unhelpful distraction. He said that it was likely to be misinterpreted; I have to say that it was, and is. I hope he will feel able to withdraw it.