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Climate Change

I hope that today we will see the end of a long retreat from Rio. That sounds a bit like a Bob Hope film, but in this case the tears will not be of laughter but only of pain. We should remind ourselves of what was said at Rio in 1992. In articles 2 and 3 of the United Nations framework convention on climate change, it was agreed that we"““must achieve a stabilisation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system””." It called for a system that would benefit"““present and future generations of humankind, on the basis of equity””" and said that"““the developed country Parties must take the lead in combating climate change””" while"““the share of global emissions originating in the developing countries will grow to meet their social and development needs.””" Almost every country in the world—about 180, including the United States—signed up to that. It is a matter of great regret that we seem to have lost sight of some of those original principles. Let me introduce a note of cross-party consensus by saying that it is a greater matter of regret given what our Prime Minister of the day, Margaret Thatcher, said three years before Rio. I will not make a habit of quoting from her, and I know that Conservative Front Benchers cannot do so nowadays because they have been told that they are not allowed to use her name in any speech. She said:"““The environmental challenge that confronts the whole world demands an equivalent response from the whole world. Every country will be affected and no one can opt out.””" Those words were true then and they are true today. As I said, we have experienced a long retreat from Rio. We have engaged in a great many displacement activities. After the conference in Monterrey in Mexico, we still talk of a lack of consensus on how to tackle climate change. Human beings often engage in displacement activities when they cannot deal with the big problem that faces them. Some Members present may have involved themselves in tidying up the house and hoovering the carpet rather than dealing with the great issue that confronts them in their lives. To a certain extent, that is what we have been doing these past 15 years in terms of climate change. We should not be so uncritical when we consider some of the activities in which we have been engaging. When we consider the role of markets in tackling climate change, we should ask ourselves a few questions about their effectiveness. I believe that they will be effective, but only if we have a framework-based set of markets, not a market-based set of frameworks. I commend an excellent report, ““Carbon Trading””, by the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, which was recently published on the internet. It provides a detailed analysis of markets and their role in tackling climate change. It states:"““According to Vincent de Rivaz, Chief Executive of EDF Energy in the UK, ‘the long-term price of tradable emissions allowances is too uncertain to be a driver of systematic technological change in an industry whose generating capacity investments must be planned over 30-year periods.’””" We are not even considering such time scales. The European Union emissions trading scheme operates over five years and the first review of it started only one year after it began. Some of the prices in other markets have swung enormously. The report states:"““The price of the right to emit one pound of nitrogen oxide zoomed from USD 0.13 in 1999 to USD 37 in July 2001””." Are we going to try to create a stable framework to tackle climate change on that basis? We should study markets carefully before fully embracing and uncritically accepting them as being capable of dealing with the problem on their own.