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Address in Reply to Her Majesty's Most Gracious Speech

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, because we now have in common an agreement that the issue of global warming was a dog that did not bark during the election. Perhaps that is unsurprising because on page 89 of the Labour Party's manifesto one finds the remarkable headline "Climate change and Africa". I have tried to make a direct connection. The manifesto goes on to say—a statement repeated by the Minister this afternoon—that the United Kingdom has met its Kyoto obligations. They are short-term and temporary obligations, and we should recognise that the fact that we have met them is the result of the fortuitous side-effect of the dash for gas in the early 1990s, which the Government stopped shortly after they were elected in 1997. As the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, stated and, indeed, as my noble friend the Duke of Montrose reminded the House, carbon dioxide emissions are now rising again. Nationally they rose by 1.6 per cent between 2002 and 2003. It is remarkable that we cannot get the 2004 figures; one would have thought that they would be available by now. In relation to transport, a figure that has not been mentioned so far this afternoon is that the emissions were up by 5.2 per cent over the same 12-month period. I am quoting Defra figures. This issue is of fundamental importance because it is global in its impact and universal in that it affects all peoples, both in developed and undeveloped communities. It is the developed world that has created the problem and therefore it has an obligation to find a technical solution—and to find it in time for the rest of the world to continue to develop without the pitfall of having to rely on mineral hydrocarbons in all their forms. That will require intense and continuous effort. During the election, I picked up two environmental announcements relating to this matter. The first appeared in the Weather Eye column in the Times, which revealed that global atmospheric carbon dioxide had risen above 378 parts per million at the end of 2004. That figure is from Mona Lau in Hawaii and it is the accepted standard. This is the third consecutive year in which the rise has been more than two parts per million. It was hoped that that accelerated rate—it used to be between one and two parts—was a statistical blip. It now appears to be a trend. If that is the case, that accelerates the impact of the warming effect of carbon dioxide on the atmosphere and it accelerates the need for society generally to find long-term solutions to these problems. We cannot allow the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to rise indefinitely and so speedy action is now of the essence. By way of background, it is worth noting that the first phase of the Kyoto agreement was supposed to save roughly 0.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per annum across the world. From that well known radical newspaper, Christian Science Monitor, I found that the energy aspirations of China and India with a relatively small contribution from the USA would, if fulfilled using coal for generation, add 2.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere per annum. That equation does not lead to any improvement at all. Of course, that additional 2.5 billion tonnes would reduce by 20 per cent if the energy did not come from coal-fired power generation but from natural gas. It would reduce to almost nothing if it was produced using nuclear. Therefore, that becomes a most significant issue and it is one that will have to be taken into account in policy. The second big announcement related to food crops in a changing climate. A Professor Long from Illinois University said: "Growing crops much closer to real conditions has shown that increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will have roughly half the beneficial effects that were previously hoped for". The use of carbon dioxide in greenhouses is a well known horticultural technique for increasing yield. But there has been a realisation that the increased temperatures—particularly if they occur when crops are flowering—can have a very damaging effect on yield. That is significant because land resources are already under pressure in the production of food. But we in Europe are entirely used to having a surplus of food and therefore a surplus of land. The natural place for that spare land is not, dare one say it, in Defra's favourite environmental programmes but in producing biofuels. I turn to what is happening globally. In Brazil, people are entirely used to having cars that run 100 per cent on bioethanol. Indeed, they have cars that are adapted to run on all proportions of ethanol, from 10 per cent through to 30, 50, 70 and 80 per cent. In the United States, 30 million tonnes of maize went into bioethanol last year. The Americans have a huge problem, but they are way ahead of anything that we in Europe are thinking about in this field. Of course, a separate issue lies behind that. Brazil has also managed to tear up 20 per cent of the Amazon rainforest, and that is not beneficial. However, my point is that we shall increase the demand for cultivation of land if we go down the biofuels route. I think that we shall have to do that because for a while we are going to need every kind of fuel that we can get and, in my view, we can no longer afford to rely on mineral hydrocarbons. In the long term, we must seriously consider the interesting point that all the green forms of energy produce electricity. We are all familiar with the controversial nature of wind. We are also familiar with the thought that tidal, ocean current and wave power will produce electricity, as will solar through photo-electrics. The green energy supply of the 21st century will be electric, as opposed to the mineral hydrocarbon energy supply of the 20th century. The problem with that is the difficulty with transport, particularly road transport. The question then is: where should we go? Battery technology does not look as though it will be successful. Of course, biofuels will play a significant role in the immediate future, but in the end we come back to electricity producing hydrogen. BMW has been running a fleet of cars on hydrogen—a small fleet, it is true—using the internal combustion engine, perfectly satisfactorily. The real future, however, appears to run with the development of fuel cells. Motor manufacturers in Japan, America and Europe are working on that. We have a fuel cell-powered bus running in London. All of these things are at the prototype stage, and that is where they will stay without some enhanced positive indication from the Government that they really mean to tackle the issue. The trouble is that it is not happening because, on the whole, the Government have preferred activity to action and prevarication to decision. That is something that has to change, and in this Parliament. The need is urgent, for everyone's sake.