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Water Management: S&T Report

My Lords, I join in the congratulations which have been heaped on the heads of the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, our Clerk and our adviser, as well as my colleagues on the committee. I especially enjoyed the speech made by my noble friend Lord Mitchell a short time ago. I am delighted to see such a self-confessed unrepentant capitalist sitting on this side of the House. Our party has perhaps moved further than I had thought since I joined it around 50 years ago. I also enjoyed his company on our visit to Australia last February. It was the height of the Australian summer so I took my lightest clothing because I expected great heat. During the week we were there, it rained every day except one—not heavily, but it rained. That may have explained the gardens, which so impressed my noble friend. This is a good report and I endorse almost all of it, but I am going to depart from the general mood of the debate by mildly dissenting on two or possibly three items. Again, I dissent mildly because I think the report is good. First, I make a pedantic point, which may come from my being a lapsed Presbyterian. We harp on about drought. We do not have a drought in this country. You have droughts in places like the Kalahari desert or in Oklahoma in the late 1930s. What we have is a serious water shortage in some parts of country and adequate supplies in others. For instance, 10 or so days ago I was on the Island of Mull, where they do not have a water shortage. I am told that the soft highland rain makes your hair curl; it does not seem to work. ““Drought”” excites journalists, but they over-estimate its effects and so perhaps we should talk about ““water shortages””. I mildly dissent from the committee in that I think we were unduly dismissive of the possibilities of a water grid. People have been pushing water around for domestic and commercial purposes for centuries. For instance, Hammurabi, who invented my profession of civil engineering in Mesopotamia in the 7th century BC, built dams, water canals and so on in order to drive water for Babylon and Baghdad, which were then the greatest cities in the world. So there is no technical problem about building a pipeline, which would probably be combined with tunnel and canal. Fifty-odd years ago, when I was a young civil engineer in Glasgow, I designed a pipeline to bring water to a tin mine in Malaya, as it then was. So if I could handle it, I am quite sure almost anyone else could. The water in southern California comes from the Rocky Mountains in Nevada, hundreds of miles away. People tell us that water is heavy stuff—which it is; I think a cubic metre of water weighs about a tonne—and that when it has to be pumped it requires energy and so on. Oil is not as heavy as water—it floats on water because it is lighter—but it is pumped and piped from Alaska to the northern mid-west states in the United states, and from Russia to western Europe. So the feasibility of a water grid as a technical exercise is perfectly within the capabilities of the construction industry that we have in this country. The Environment Agency does not like it, but the Environment Agency does not like very much of this kind. We are not surprised that the Environment Agency does not like it; perhaps we should pay less heed to what it says. The other item with which I dissent—albeit mildly—is that I think we were far too dismissive of the possibilities of desalination. I believe there are half-a-dozen schemes under consideration in this country and we know that there are at least 30 or so in Saudi Arabia which have been in operation for quite a long time. It seems to me that in the cases of both the grid and desalination we were over-impressed by thoughts of their effect on the environment, on energy use and on CO2 emissions. I agree entirely with what the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, said about the environment in his extremely interesting contribution to the debate. We have to remember that this country’s contribution to global CO2 emissions is 2 per cent. Theoretically, if we could get rid of the whole of that, it would do two things: it would wreck our economy and make very little difference to global emissions worldwide. It is true that increased emissions would result from producing a pipeline or a desalination station, but they would be very small compared with the global problem. At a time when the Government are hoping to reduce our contribution to global emissions from2 per cent to perhaps 1.5 per cent—that is not a target but an estimate of what they are likely to achieve—it would not matter terribly if they achieved 1.6 per cent rather than 1.5 per cent. That would be the likely effect of the increase resulting from desalination. I think we were too timid there, but that did not prevent us producing a thoroughly worthwhile report, which deserved a much better response from the Government than it got.