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Energy White Paper

My Lords, the noble Lord says that the situation has not changed since 1978. Although I have not been in your Lordships’ House for that length of time, I can certainly say that from my standpoint things have changed since the publication of the previous energy White Paper in 2003. That is for two main reasons. First, the science on climate change widely accepts that it is manmade and is accelerating. I do not need to go into the details of the IPCC report and Sir Nicholas Stern’s report. It is now broadly accepted across the world, including in the United States and China, that there is a problem with climate change, that it is accelerating and that we need to tackle it. The second reason, security of supply, did not exist in the same way even back in 2003. The relative price of energy and fossil fuel has increased quite dramatically since then. Increasingly, we are becoming more dependent on less stable parts of the world for our energy. We are witnessing a faster decline in our North Sea resources than we envisaged, which increases our energy dependence. By 2020 something like 80 per cent of our gas will be imported. While we currently import about 30 per cent from Norway, it is a fact that we will have to look further afield for our gas to countries such as Qatar, Algeria, Trinidad, parts of Africa and central Asia—leaving Russia apart. Therefore, we need to increase the diversity of our supply. All those points, particularly tackling climate change and ensuring our security of supply, have changed the argument on nuclear from where I stand. On methane, the noble Lord mentioned energy crops and the importance of sustainability, with which I would agree. On deforestation, we should ensure that the actions we take in the UK and Europe do not have detrimental effects on developing parts of the world. We ought to be very aware of that.