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Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Bill

I confess that I was minded to seek to divide the House on this Bill because I have grave reservations about it, as I will explain. However, having heard what the Minister said, I do not think that that will be necessary at this stage. I would be content for the Bill to receive a Second Reading as it will be important for the Committee to give thought to what the Minister has said—it certainly attracted me—and we can spend productive time on Report and then decide whether to let the Bill make further progress. However, the House would not expect me to allow this opportunity to pass without making a few remarks about aspects of climate change. I take as my texts today a letter from the Minister for Climate Change and the Environment, the report by the excellent Economic Affairs Committee of the House of Lords and the excellent work by Mr. Bjorn Lomborg, ““The Sceptical Environmentalist””, which I highly recommend to hon. Members. I shall first set the scenario—a much loved word by environmentalists—for the debate and then move on to some consideration of the Bill. I shall touch briefly on mitigation versus adaptation, multilateral versus unilateral action, developed versus developing countries, and the role of technology in the response to climate change. I shall start with an excellent letter, which I received in reply to one that I had written on behalf of a constituent, from the Minister for Climate Change and the Environment, joined at the hip as he is to the Minister in his place today. They are undoubtedly inseparable. The letter mainly concentrates on the effects of climate change on sea levels. The first thing that caught my eye was the statement:"““Relative sea level in the Thames estuary will continue to rise by between 26 and 86 cm by the 2080s.””" In many ways, that statement encapsulates the problem that we face as we discuss climate change and its possible impact. A range of possibility between 26 cm and 86 cm may not sound very much, but it is a crucial difference for all of us, especially those living in coastal and low-lying areas, to say nothing of those living in countries such as the Maldives, which I had the pleasure and privilege of visiting on behalf of the House just last year. That range of possibility should give us all pause for thought. I shall return to that theme later. One of the great problems of rushing like Gadarene swine to support anything labelled global warming, climate change or emissions is that so much uncertainty surrounds the analysis. We should be extremely cautious about rushing towards solutions such as those proposed in the Bill. That is why I welcomed the Minister for Energy’s rather more cautious approach. Although it is fashionable in such Bills—generated, as they usually are, by rather narrow single-interest groups—to try to solve many problems by legislation and to try to pin the Government of the day down to the certainties that many people want, the reality, as the Minister pointed out, is that life simply is not like that. It is certainly not like that when we start with such a wide range of possibilities in the analysis, before we can even consider the solutions. The letter referred to Greenland ice sheet melt, stating that"““even if begun in this century, it would take up to 3000 years to melt and thus raise sea levels by 6 metres in total on a time scale of millennia””." That strikes me as an extraordinarily long perspective, even for this Government. Many boasts are made about long-term targets, but I should be extremely impressed if we were adopting targets with a 3,000-year perspective. The Minister continued, a little more percipiently, that"““a total loss of the western Antarctic ice sheet would raise global sea levels by an average of 6 metres””—" although he noted that it was unlikely to occur in the next 200 years. We must bear such time perspectives in mind as we talk about relatively ready solutions to what are deemed to be their causes. I shall return to those arguments when I touch on the comparisons that we must take into account between the developed and the developing world. As I shall say later, it is one thing to make arguments about the solutions to such alleged problems as emissions and carbon dioxide in the context of our society, our relative wealth and the sort of sacrifice that we might have to make in our standard of living, or indeed in our economic growth; but it is quite another thing when we try to impose the same solutions on the developing world, where people have much less scope, in terms of either economic growth or standards of living, to deal with the problems.