EU Membership: UK Science

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Thursday 23rd March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, like others, I commend my noble friend—indeed, my noble kinsman—Lord Selborne for his very skilful chairing of this report. Like the noble Lord, Lord Fox, I thank the other members of the committee for putting up with my strange interventions from time to time.

I will focus on regulation and its impact on innovation; in particular, the first item of the Government’s response to our December report. The Government say in that response that, thanks to UK influence,

“the EU has changed its approach to regulation”,

and that,

“Brussels is now more focused on reducing burdens for businesses”,

and,

“recognises the need for innovation-friendly regulation”.

I am sorry to say that I disagree with this and I see few signs of it. On glyphosate and neonicotinoids, on GM crops and GM insects, on data mining and digital technology, on snus and vaping, on great crested newts and long-eared bats, on stem cells and gene editing, on biomass burning and diesel—on many, many matters—I see Britain losing opportunities to bring in safer, cleaner and greener innovations because of our interpretation of rules promulgated in Brussels. As a result, we are not just unhelpful but counterproductive and are making things—environmental problems, health problems and economic competitiveness —worse. We are overzealous in applying the precautionary principle so as to effectively outlaw safer new innovations to the advantage of less safe existing technologies. We refuse to distinguish between hazard and risk, so that chemicals that are safer than coffee—even though they are never ingested, like coffee is—are banned. We are indecisive, slow, cumbersome and sometimes in hock to big companies and their desire to create barriers to entry.

I stress that I am not against regulation that makes the world safer, I am against regulation that makes the world more dangerous. My opposition is not ideological but pragmatic. I am calling for regulatory reform, not deregulation. For example, we are using more insecticides today in farming than we would have done if we had adopted genetically modified crops—that is undeniable given the evidence from the rest of the world about how BT crops have reduced the need for insecticides. Being in the EU, therefore, has been bad for bees and bad for birds.

The EU is about to make the same mistake, I fear, over the even safer and even more organic technology of gene editing. As Nature magazine put it in an editorial recently, the EU is,

“habitually paralysed whenever genetic modification is discussed. Two years ago the European Commission requested all member states to hold back on giving the all-clear on gene editing while it considered its options. Now its hand is being forced, ever so slowly, by the referral of the issue by France to the European Court of Justice … last October”.

A decision on that case is not expected before 2018, while America roars ahead with this technology. If this is innovation-friendly regulation, we can do better.

Then there is data analysis, where EU red tape is handing a competitive advantage to other continents. Lenard Koschwitz, director of European affairs with Allied for Startups, recently said that,

“post-Brexit Britain could draw data analytics start-ups. We currently see countries including China and Singapore doing away with barriers for text mining. Why not the UK also?”.

More generally, we should listen to the wise words of Sir John Bell, the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University. Writing in the Financial Times last August, he said:

“Britain is more inclined towards a relatively liberal risk-based regulatory environment that allows fields to move quickly—to reflect on ethical issues but not to over-regulate. The EU, by contrast, has a record of deep regulatory conservatism, attempting to legislate and control many aspects of science that are not deemed here in the UK to present a significant danger”.


He concluded:

“A failure to implement sweeping changes to regulation and its institutions in the UK would be to miss an important opportunity. We need light touch regulation similar to Switzerland so that Britain can become a global leader in life sciences, data, genomics, regenerative medicine and other innovation-based fields”.


In the hearings for this report we heard similar responses in evidence. Dr Beth Thompson of the Wellcome Trust told us that,

“we are discussing where we might be able to tweak legislation or look for advantages for the UK”,

so,

“there is real potential that we can use the UK as almost a testbed to try new regulatory approaches and within a more robust framework be more experimental”.

Sir Michael Rawlins of the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency said:

“We could be swifter than the EU. Right at the very end it is not the European Medicines Agency that gives marketing authorisation; it is the Commission en collège, and it takes 67 days on average. Someone I know very well in the pharmaceutical industry told me that each day of delay for a pharmaceutical marketing authorisation costs the company about $1 million. That is $67 million gone waiting for the Commission to decide to meet en collège”.


When we leave the EU we need an innovation principle, alongside a sensible version of the precautionary principle. It should state that all regulators must take into account whether the enforcement of a new rule would stifle innovation that could be beneficial. So in replying, I ask my noble friend to assure us that, in contrast to the message delivered by the response I quoted at the start of my remarks to our December report, he agrees this is a time for boldness, in regulatory reforms as well as in every other respect.

Shale Gas

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Tuesday 7th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, it is always a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green, who speaks a great deal of common sense on these issues. I declare my interests in energy as listed in the register—they are mainly in coal, which is threatened by shale gas, and so I should be against it but I am not.

I first visited a shale gas well in Pennsylvania in 2011 while writing a report for a think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, founded by my noble friend Lord Lawson. At that time, most energy analysts were still arguing that shale gas was a flash in the pan. I concluded that that was almost certainly wrong and that we were witnessing an energy revolution of huge significance. And so it proved. America went from importing to exporting gas. The shale boom pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into the American economy through domestic production and lower prices. The environmental problems were minimal. President Obama’s Energy Secretary confirmed this in 2015, when he said:

“I still have not seen any evidence of fracking per se contaminating groundwater”.


Over the past decade, America has cut its carbon dioxide emissions faster than any country, thanks almost entirely to the shale gas revolution. It did so while simultaneously bringing heavy industry back onshore, whereas we have driven it away. Saudi Arabia tried to kill the shale drilling business in 2014 by flooding the market and cutting prices. It failed—the technology keeps improving and, as my noble friend Lord MacGregor said, the break-even price gets lower and lower.

Last November, I was on a shale-oil site in Colorado watching the new quiet-fracking fleet do its work: an operation that takes about the same length of time as building a wind turbine and is as limited in area, but produces hundreds of times more energy and is about 2% as prominent in height in the landscape when it is finished.

In 2011, I wrote that,

“shale gas faces a formidable host of enemies in the coal, nuclear, renewable and environmental industries—all keen, it seems, to strangle it at birth, especially in Europe”.

I was right about that too. What was the reaction of the environmental movement to this gift from the gods? To oppose it with all its might, even at the cost of telling the truth. This year, Friends of the Earth was forced by the Advertising Standards Authority to withdraw several misleading claims it had made about shale gas. As the noble Lord, Lord Young, said, it even resorted to arguing that sand is carcinogenic. It did not quite have the brass neck to complain about dihydrogen monoxide, which is injected in large quantities into shale gas wells—for those whose chemistry is rusty, that is H₂O, or water.

Who is behind this anti-shale propaganda? Let us look at who stands to suffer from a successful shale revolution here. First, the subsidy-drunk renewable energy industry, still trying to justify things like burning American forests for electricity. The former DECC chief scientist, the late Professor David MacKay, found that in particular circumstances, using wood pellets to generate electricity could have a carbon footprint almost twice that of coal and four times that of gas, and yet we subsidise foreign wood pellets and stand in the way of shale gas.

The second group with an interest in undermining British shale gas, apparently, is a foreign power. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former NATO Secretary-General, has accused Moscow of campaigning to undermine shale gas. Here is a quote from National Review magazine in 2015:

“Russia has ramped up covert payments to environmental groups in the West. By supporting well-intentioned environmentalists with hard cash (often without their knowledge), Russian intelligence gains Western mouthpieces to petition Western audiences in its favor.”


Sure enough, the Kremlin’s mouthpiece, RT, Russia Today, has been broadcasting anti-UK shale propaganda on its “Keiser Report”, including the line that,

“frackers are the moral equivalent of paedophiles”.

The US Director of National Intelligence said very recently:

“RT runs anti-fracking programming, highlighting environmental issues and the impacts on public health. This is likely reflective of the Russian Government’s concern about the impact of fracking and US natural gas production on the global energy market and the potential challenges to Gazprom’s profitability”.


This is what we are up against. The noble Lord, Lord Truscott, knows Russia well. Given what I have said, can he shed any light on which anti-fracking protesters in this country are funded directly or indirectly by Russian interests?

We will be burning gas for decades to come under any policy. Even the national grid’s extreme “gone green” scenario for future energy policy sees us burning almost as much gas in 2035 as we burn today. But more than that, we have a huge chemical industry in this country, employing hundreds of thousands of people directly and indirectly. It needs methane and ethane, derived from natural gas wells, as feedstock. That industry will disappear rapidly if we do not exploit domestic shale. It has repeatedly warned us of this. As the GMB union puts it, if exploratory drilling reveals a plentiful supply of UK shale gas reserves,

“is it not a moral duty for Britain to take responsibility for providing for our own gas needs from those supplies rather than importing gas from elsewhere”?

Beneath Lancashire and Yorkshire, in the Bowland shale, lies one of the richest shale gas resources ever discovered. As the noble Lord, Lord Young, said, just 10% of it would be enough to provide 50 years of British needs. We know how to get it out, using sand and water to make millimetre-wide cracks a mile and a half down, with minimal environmental risks. The tiny group of middle-class southerners who go north to protest about this stuff are not representative of public opinion. Let us not us give in to the 21st-century Luddites, commercial interests or foreign crony-capitalists who do not have our interests at heart.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Featherstone (LD)]

My Lords, I find myself in opposition to the vast majority of your Lordships who have spoken. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Truscott, on securing this debate, which I regard as very important. I do not agree, or believe, that fracking will deliver energy security in the long term. I do not believe that fracking is sustainable or will help us meet our legally binding targets. I believe that it will introduce a new form of greenhouse gas. It is not sensible or logical, when we have just signed up to the Paris agreement on climate change, to encourage forward a source of energy that emits greenhouse gases.

There is a litany of reasons why fracking is a bad idea. I can see that the Government look across the sea—the Atlantic—with green eyes. Could shale gas do for the UK what it has done for the US? Many noble Lords believe that it could, but I do not—so no would be my answer. We have different geology and geography. To some degree, the Government are keen because private money will come in and produce the gas. As many of your Lordships have said, this gas will be an interim supply of energy—a bridging loan to the future. It will get the Government out of a hole that exposes a lack of a planned energy policy, and take us from where we are now to a sustainable future. We have had no sight of the emissions reduction plan and no word on government plans to decarbonise heating. As for the experts, I am not sure that this Government believe in experts.

I hear what your Lordships have said about the scare stories but I believe some of the doctors and health charities that have raised concerns about water contamination and threats to health. The contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Mair, was very impressive and substantial but Scotland and Wales have banned it. I do not think that they banned it for no reason. Moreover, this is not America. In America, landowners’ rights mean that they get the profits from selling their land for fracking. We do not have wide-open unpopulated areas and the ravages caused by fracking, with literally thousands of wells, will lay the land to waste—and this is inhabited land, not like in America.

[Viscount Ridley]

Is the noble Baroness aware that the current revolution in shale gas started in the suburbs of Fort Worth, which is an inhabited city, and has reached its apogee in some very heavily populated areas of Pennsylvania?

[Baroness Featherstone]

As my noble friend Lord Stoneham reminds me, their environmental standards are somewhat lower than ours. I am not saying that everywhere in America is unpopulated, but it is a very different territory from most of the United Kingdom.

There will be people—such as people in Ryedale, for example—who object strongly to what is projected for their local environment. They will use the planning process to object in the way that they are entitled to do. Promises were made that national areas of exceptional beauty would be protected and that local people would hold sway, but that has gone and the promises have been broken.

Putting all that to one side, the most damaging effect of developing the shale industry is one that to an extent was referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Smith. It will set back our ability to reach our legally binding targets by 40 years and undermine the development to scale of renewable heat technology. Renewable heat is vital. Industry will develop the technologies we need for renewable heat if we have the right policy framework and incentives. There would have to be incentives that carry a cast-iron guarantee from the Government that they will not be taken away in a precipitate manner, as happened with the Government undermining investor confidence by the precipitate removal of agreed subsidies on wind and solar. The noble Lord, Lord Smith, raised the breaking of the manifesto pledge on carbon capture and storage.

The Government’s reputation will no longer be adequate to reassure investors; they will need an agreement that is literally written in blood. Additionally, as several noble Lords have said, all we have in the UK so far is licences for exploratory drilling. We are years if not decades away from producing shale gas at any scale, if it happens at all. The Environmental Audit Committee concluded that shale will not contribute to replacing coal because, by the time it comes on stream, coal will no longer be used. I do not believe that fracking is the answer. I do not put my trust in this Government. Everything we have seen since the end of the coalition—when the Liberal Democrats held sway in the Department of Energy and Climate Change, which is also no longer—is pretty indicative of the importance that the Conservative Government attach to climate change. Everything indicates that this Government do not favour a green approach, green understanding or the imperative, for both the planet and the economy, of taking our future energy supply seriously and not introducing something that is a stop-gap and not sustainable. If we had a Government who encouraged cutting-edge technology—renewables, energy efficiency, home energy improvements—

Green Investment Bank

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Tuesday 1st November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

The trustees will have all they need to do their job, but the noble Lord will of course recall from our lengthy and useful discussions during the passage of the Bill that their role relates to the articles of association, ensuring that the green purposes of the bank are maintained. That is where they come in: they are not envisaged as a management board for the GIB, whether in its current state or whatever. They have an important role to play.

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, are green investments judged by their results or their intentions?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

The GIB is a commercial operation. It has its purposes, and it judges where it should make investments. What we have in the GIB—a world first—is a dedicated green investment bank, which we should celebrate and which a number of bidders have showed an interest in acquiring so it can move forwards and expand.

Nissan: Sunderland

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Monday 31st October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

I certainly agree with the noble Lord that the aerospace and aviation industries are incredibly important to Britain. I have already asked on a previous occasion to have a conversation with him about Yeovil in particular, so that I can report to my noble friend and other Ministers who deal with these issues. Especially at this time of uncertainty with Brexit, we need to engage more with business across the UK and discuss difficult issues that arise.

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, will the Minister confirm that Nissan’s practice, when choosing at which plant to build a new model, is to organise competitive tendering among its plants all around the world, that the best one wins and that that is why this decision has come? As recently as August, the BBC was reporting that Nissan in Sunderland would not even be able to bid for these new models, let alone win those competitions—a speculation in the long tradition of pessimism about the Nissan plant, going back to how it would be lost if we did not join the Euro et cetera. This is a tribute to the fact that, whatever the conditions, this plant is highly competitive thanks to the brilliant work done in the north-east of England.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

My noble friend is entirely right. It is great news and a tribute to Sunderland and the people of Sunderland. I am delighted to know that Nissan in the UK scores so very well in the international league tables.

Carbon Budget Order 2016

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Tuesday 19th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Featherstone (LD)]

My Lords, first, I take this opportunity to welcome the noble Baroness to her new role. It is a big portfolio to learn in a couple of days.

I am pleased and relieved that Her Majesty’s Government have accepted the recommendation of the Committee on Climate Change for the 57% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2030 for the fifth carbon budget, relative to 1990 levels. Since I arrived in your Lordships’ House only at the end of last November, more often than not I have had to criticise and berate the Government for their lack of commitment to tackling climate change and their relentless litany of anti-green actions, from sudden removal of subsidy to renewables industries to the privatisation of the Green Bank, and much between. Therefore, I am encouraged that this commitment will send a message out loud and clear to the world that we remain a country committed to tackling climate change and determined to reduce our emissions right across our energy industry, from power, from buildings, from transport and of course by reducing demand.

It is especially important because, at this moment of uncertainty for the future of the UK in its journey out of the European Union, despite the reassurances we have received from the Dispatch Box both here and in another place that we will both stick to our legally binding EU targets and ratify our signature to the Paris agreement, more is needed. It was a dreadful blow to hear that the Department for Energy and Climate Change is to be no longer. It has gone—collapsed into the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Climate change is no longer named. I fear that that sends out the exact opposite signal: that tackling climate change has been demoted and de-prioritised.

No doubt the noble Baroness will say that that is not at all the case, but I may not believe her. Actions always speak louder than words, and the actions of the Government today and since the end of the coalition have all been in the wrong direction. So I look to the noble Baroness to assure me that climate change will get the attention it needs, particularly given that the National Grid has said that the UK is almost certain to miss our EU 2020 targets for renewables. Will she commit to ratifying the Paris agreement immediately, to send a clear message that climate change will be given priority?

It would also be extremely helpful if the noble Baroness could persuade our new Secretary of State, Greg Clark, urgently to set down in writing his commitment to the future of this planet. With this loud and proud announcement of the fifth carbon budget, we could be in a position to zoom ahead, become world leaders in decarbonisation and tackling climate change and nurture a green economic boom with the innovation we are seeing in low-carbon technologies. I would love to think that that will be the case, but I fear not.

Even on the fifth carbon budget itself and the other order there is a “but”. We on this side of the House are very concerned that Her Majesty’s Government have extended the third carbon budget by 10% when the net account was already 10% below where it needed to be to meet the third carbon budget in 2014. The offset provision should be used only in an emergency and as a last resort against highly unusual and unforeseen circumstances.

To meet the reductions set out in the fifth carbon budget, we urge the Government to prioritise domestic action. Our menu for the Government would be to: support and encourage the renewables industry; quicken and intensify energy efficiency measures; introduce urgently a zero-carbon homes standard—something which we Liberal Democrats championed while in coalition and during the passage of the Housing and Planning Bill, which the new Secretary of State for Energy sadly did not support in his previous role in the Department for Communities and Local Government—support technological innovation; get on with tidal lagoons and give the go-ahead to Swansea Bay. Proof and pudding need to be the order of the day, so I look forward to seeing the plan that the UK Government have committed to set out on how it will meet the fourth and fifth carbon budgets by the end of 2016.

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend on her new position and look forward to working with and encouraging her in this area. I declare my interests as listed in the register, including an interest in coal mining in Northumberland.

I beg my noble friend to pause and reconsider on the Motion. The fact that the Liberal Democrats are enthusiastically in support encourages me to beg even harder. This order is a piece of economic self-harm. It is against government policy, it will do precisely no good for the climate of the planet, it will hurt the poorest people in the country and cost jobs, and it will cripple our ability to grow the economy.

Let me take those four points in turn. First, it is against government policy to take unilateral action on carbon dioxide emissions that goes further and faster than any other country. This was explicitly stated by George Osborne in 2011, when he told the Conservative party conference:

“Let’s at the very least resolve that we’re going to cut our carbon emissions no slower but also no faster than our fellow countries in Europe”.

Amber Rudd repeated that promise and went even further last year when she said:

“We have to travel in step with what is happening in the rest of the world”.

The EU in Paris last year promised cuts of 40% by 2030. Here we are promising 57%. That is a unilateral offer to go almost one and half times as fast. Furthermore, why is there no mention of Brexit in the impact assessment, which runs to 97 pages? This is a serious omission and should be put right.

The policy is against government policy in another way. The National Audit Office study last week confirmed the finding of the Office for Budget Responsibility that there is likely to be a large overspend on the levy control framework—about £1 billion over the £7.6 billion permitted in 2020—and the Government’s own planning data show that there are sufficient planning permissions for renewable generators to overshoot the electricity component of the target by approximately 35%, for which there is no budget.

Secondly, how much would this extra 17% cut in the fifth carbon budget reduce global temperatures, if it could be achieved? The UK produces 1.1% of world CO₂ emissions. Reducing those by an extra 17% would reduce global emissions by 0.15%. The total warming expected by 2090 is between 0.8 and 2 degrees centigrade, depending on whether you choose the RCP 4.5 or the RCP 6 emission scenario and whether you choose the Lewis or the CMIP model sensitivity. So our unilateral action would reduce global warming by 2090 by between 0.001 and 0.003 degree centigrade.

Thirdly, for that infinitesimal achievement we are being asked to pay with the jobs of British workers, the lives of British pensioners, and the standard of living of every person in this country. In the Government’s low fossil fuel price scenario for 2030, domestic households would see prices 60% higher than they would otherwise be in 2030, while medium-sized businesses would see increases of 114%. Those latter increases will necessarily be passed through to domestic households in the costs of goods and services, giving a much greater total cost of living effect than that found in household energy bills alone. To these must be added electricity system costs for grid expansion and management. My noble friend says that we are meeting the targets in the carbon budget, but we are doing so at the cost of jobs in energy-intensive industries.

Meanwhile, fuel poverty currently kills several thousand people a year. Renewables subsidies will hit those with electric heating particularly hard, and they are already among the most vulnerable households in the country. The impact assessment claims that there is net benefit from these measures, but that claim depends entirely on energy prices, as it freely admits, and the unlamented Department of Energy and Climate Change has been systematically and catastrophically wrong about energy prices again and again. So I am afraid that the claim of net benefit is not worth the paper on which it is written.

Fourthly, the effect of this fifth carbon budget will be to slow the British economy. Even if we stop awarding new subsidy contracts in 2020, the total cost of this programme between 2002 and 2035 or so, when the last contracts expire, will be in the region of £150 billion to £200 billion. That is not counting the cost of subsidies to the French Government to build the Hinkley white elephant. A very large proportion of those subsidies is being paid to buy very expensive renewable energy equipment from German, Danish and Spanish manufacturers and to reward overseas owners, some of them state owned. It is a significant transfer of wealth overseas.

All this adds up to a terrible cost and—worse still—a terrible opportunity cost to the British economy. It comes at a time when the UK needs to become dynamic as never before to make our way in the world post Brexit. Affordable energy is the very cause of prosperity. It amplifies the work of individuals, dramatically raising productivity. The attempt to force an energy transition way ahead of the learning curve and against a far steeper cost gradient than was ever envisaged when fossil fuel prices were high is genuinely hazardous. A coerced return to the thin, costly and variable flows of renewable energy that characterised the medieval economy risks causing deep and lasting economic harm, as well as jeopardising the broader environment, for only prosperous countries can afford to care for the natural world.