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Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Bill

I am most grateful to my hon. Friend, who refers to other factors that will inevitably be crucial. We must make a series of important decisions. The first is: what is the best vehicle by which we can try to take decisions and move the issue forward? Is it us alone, is it us through the European Union, is it us with our English-speaking friends, is it us with the Commonwealth or is it in some more global context? For example, should we be seeking to link the issues of adaptation to climate change to trade negotiations or to technology transfer? Surely spending more resources in the wealthy world on research and development is key to developing the technologies that would enable us and, crucially, developing countries to respond to the problems caused by climate change. All those factors are crucial. Like, I suspect, my hon. Friend, I see no sign of any of that taking place. Instead, our country is acting in an uncharacteristically blinkered, inward-looking and narrow way. We congratulate ourselves on what we are doing, but neglect all the other factors that will eventually be much more crucial. Why are we not having a debate about what we should be doing in terms of technology development, technology transfer and helping the developing world to look more to adaptation as much as to the mitigation of climate change through considering emissions? There is a whole policy area that we have barely touched on. Whether the technologies that we are talking about make sense is another issue for consideration. Too many rather easy assumptions are made about the efficacy of different types of technology. Unusually today—perhaps because they are not explicitly referred to in the Bill—we have not heard too much about some of the more exotic technologies. However, I have always had severe doubts about a range of possibilities in renewables and how efficacious they will be. I will touch on that point when I consider the Bill, which I shall come to shortly. I wonder whether the focus is necessarily right. One of the great problems in this debate is that, as with many other things, one gets trends and then trendy ideas. Things emerge that are made to sound attractive and people latch on to them. We then make a great mistake in that they are portrayed as being the answer to the problem or one of the answers to it. Sadly, that rarely turns out to be the case. I remember when I still worked in the real world back in the 1970s. I was involved in a small company that was trying to play its part in developing solar energy in this country. Of course, the technology was in its early stages then, but it became fairly obvious that, in a climate such as ours, solar energy was probably unlikely to be the answer to the problems as we saw them at the time. The technology has moved on but, sadly, our climate has not changed very much at all. That raises another intriguing possibility that I shall touch on in passing and that is not often discussed. There can be positive effects of global warming in a number of interesting and different ways. Global warming is nearly always portrayed as being negative, as having the most horrendous effects in all sorts of areas. However, most of the analyses seem to demonstrate that—whether in terms of agriculture or, in many countries, in terms of health or many other ways—a degree of global warming may not necessarily be that bad a thing.