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Finance (No. 2) Bill

I should declare that, as well as being a member of the Transport and General Workers Union and the Law Society, I joined Greenpeace in 1975 and I am also a member of Friends of the Earth. I declare that interest because, as we can see from the Opposition amendment before us and from the Budget, environmental issues are very much de nos jours. We should be more sophisticated in the way in which we talk about the environment. I seem to remember that the Green party got 15 per cent. of the vote in the 1994 European elections, but enthusiasm for green issues then seemed to ebb. These things go up and down. As you might know, Madam Deputy Speaker, Birmingham airport now provides direct flights from the west midlands to Poland. I have been mulling over these issues for some time, and I took what turned out to be the inaugural flight on SkyEurope. It was very good going out, but a bit delayed coming back. However, I would recommend it as a way of visiting Poland. I got to Birmingham airport at 7 am on Wednesday just before Easter, and the place was packed. I started to reflect on what people actually do, in contradistinction to what they say. I suspect that this applies to most hon. Members, although there will be some exceptions. Most hon. Members to whom I talk socially take many flights—often cheap flights—during the year, and I suspect that most of them drive cars. Most probably drive thousands of miles a year, as I do myself. I drove about 4,000 miles last year. We need to be careful, given the measures that we propose, that we are not seen as hypocrites. We must not appear to be behaving like King Canute on these issues. Global warming has been much talked about in this debate, and so it should be. I referred to it in two interventions on my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Global warming is here to stay, and it is going to get worse. The United Kingdom emits roughly 2 per cent. of all greenhouse gases. If we halved that tomorrow, it would make hardly a dent in the problem. I stress that that is not to say that we should back off from the admirable efforts that the Government have made, in this Budget and previously, to cut the United Kingdom’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. However, if the world’s emissions went down by 1 per cent.—which would be the result of halving our 2 per cent. contribution—it would make almost no difference whatever to the effect within the United Kingdom. I detect among many hon. Members—I include myself in this—and among people in our society some hypocrisy about what they do in their personal lives about carbon emissions and a tendency to behave like ostriches in relation to climate change. Most of what we hear about climate change relates to cutting the emissions of one relatively small emitter, which is important but would not stop the projected 1 m rise in sea levels by 2100, which is an awful lot for an island. By 2050, under global warming, average temperatures are projected to rise by 3.5°C. It is suggested that, if no steps are taken to halt climate change globally, the world could warm up by an average of 13°C over the next 1,000 years. That would give London the climate that Cairo currently has, although London would no longer exist as it would be under water.