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Carbon Dioxide Reduction Target

I am grateful for the opportunity to hold this Adjournment debate today, not least because it is my birthday. I thank Mr. Speaker for allowing me to hold the debate on such a momentous day. It is also the last day for submissions to the consultation on the draft Climate Change Bill. I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister for Climate Change and the Environment will take on board my contribution—I will, of course, buy him a drink afterwards. This is the first debate in the House on climate change since last week’s G8 summit, which made some important progress, albeit from a very low threshold. I want to make it plain at the start that I support the Government’s initiative to launch the draft Climate Change Bill. It is a world first and, for that reason, I hope that we get it right. I support the rationale behind the Bill, which states:"““The Climate Change Bill is necessary to provide a clear, credible and long term domestic framework for tackling climate change, whilst at the same time allowing the UK to demonstrate strong international leadership, which is key to helping achieve multilateral agreements.””" That is what I want to focus on—the quality of leadership. I sought this debate not because I am a pedant obsessed with figures, although some might disagree with that assessment, but because I believe that if we are to tackle climate change effectively, we should do our best to be aware of what the figures provided by bodies such as the intergovernmental panel on climate change, and in our own 2005 climate change conference, actually mean. We could set any target we liked, but we should be honest and tell people the likely consequences of whatever target we choose. We could say, as some still do at the international level, that we do not want any targets at all. Of course, if we did that, we would be inviting mammoth damages to our economic prospects, and death and destruction on a massive scale, as Nick Stern indicated. We would not be able to insulate ourselves from the consequences. That is the most irresponsible position imaginable, but there are a host of positions on dealing with the problem, on a sliding scale of enthusiasm. At the other end of the scale, we could don a painful hair shirt and make immediate heavy cuts in emissions—something that no Government appear willing to do, for understandable short-term reasons. We have chosen the target of a 60 per cent. cut in emissions by 2050—a reasonably high figure, by most other countries’ standards. That is the figure in the draft Climate Change Bill, although I realise that the Bill refers to a cut of ““at least 60 per cent.”” I can see why we would use the phrase ““at least”” in the Bill, but it has no legal meaning whatever. If I told you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that you had to pay a fine of at least £60, well, £60 would do. Indeed, more often than not, the Bill’s target of at least 60 per cent. is referred to in official documentation as simply 60 per cent. In Downing street, at the Department of Trade and Industry, and in the Secretary of State’s speech to the United Nations last week, the prefix ““at least”” has been in the habit of disappearing. That might appear a trite point, but it is actually very serious. To understand why, we should study how we alighted on the 60 per cent. figure. As the Government acknowledged, it originated in the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution report entitled ““Energy—the Changing Climate””, published in 2000. The 60 per cent. figure was derived from a calculation that suggested that a CO2 concentration in the atmosphere of 550 parts per million may be an acceptable limit allowing us to contain global warming at a reasonable level, but no country can calculate its own target for greenhouse gas emission reductions from a greenhouse gas stabilisation level without factoring in the share that it must bear of global emission reductions. It would be worse than pointless to pretend that we could ignore the distribution of responsibility among countries. Of course, the United Nations framework convention on climate change recognises that fact. As my hon. Friend the Minister knows only too well, the formula that our 60 per cent. calculation relies on is called contraction and convergence, and the RCEP report used that framework, coupled with an upper limit of 550 parts per million, to arrive at the 60 per cent. target. Sadly, as our understanding has progressed, and in light of more recent reports—notably Stern—we have realised that that target will, more likely than not, lead us into ““a very dangerous place””, as Stern says. I therefore cannot see why we do not run the contraction and convergence formula that the RCEP used seven years ago again to get a more up-to-date figure. There are things that we need to factor into the calculation that were not, to a great extent, factored in seven years ago—things such as positive feedbacks. Examples include permafrost melting and releasing methane; the albedo effect of the Arctic icecap being lost as that icecap melts, and the seas therefore absorbing more sunshine; and the possibility of the rain forest dying. We talk about sink failures; more recently, we have heard about the acidity levels of the southern ocean reaching dangerous levels, and its therefore not being able to absorb as much CO2 as we originally thought that it might. I can imagine several political reasons why the Government fight shy of acknowledging the intellectual basis of the 60 per cent. target, but it simply cannot be concealed any longer. I say that because I want the Climate Change Bill to become the gold standard of climate change legislation, and I want it to be emulated by other countries. For that to happen, it is essential that we heed the response that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs gave to my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, North and Leith (Mark Lazarowicz) at the Environmental Audit Committee last week. The Secretary of State said that we must not pluck figures out of thin air. I do not think that my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, North and Leith wanted to pluck anything out of thin air, but he did want a scientific and logical justification for the 60 per cent. target. When we are not prepared to admit that a figure is problematic, our explanations of it become problematic. That was amply demonstrated by the Government’s chief scientific adviser in evidence to the Joint Committee on the Draft Climate Change Bill the day after the Environmental Audit Committee met. He simply could not make things match up. Frankly, he tied himself up in knots. That approach is categorically not good enough. I have said recently that the reasoning behind the current figure lacks intellectual rigour, and I say so again. We have to decide whether we want to seek a safe and sustainable stabilisation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or not, and if the answer is ““not”” we should prepare accordingly, which means spending a lot more on adaptation, and we should make plain to people what we think the consequences will be. However, if we want to achieve that safe and sustainable level—and I know that the Government do—we should calculate what effort is required in the time scale available. From that figure we can backcast all the things that we need to do to achieve it; it does not work the other way round. There is no serious, scientific study that tells us that the chance of containing a temperature increase to 2° C on the basis of a 60 per cent. cut in emissions by 2050 is more than evens. I know it, the Government know it, and anyone who takes climate change seriously knows it, so why do we persist with the 60 per cent. figure, even if the phrase ““at least”” 60 per cent. is used? Clearly, the politics is having difficulty keeping up with the science. The spectacle of George Bush apparently agreeing to a 50 per cent. target last week tells us what is going on—not frightening the horses is what is going on. I do not believe for one moment that Bush has any intention of honouring his alleged pledge, not least because he will not be President when the time comes to sign on the dotted line. That shows how difficult it is to get any movement at all at the top level, and to get others to follow us, but does that mean that we have to gut the science and make it bend to our notion of realpolitik? Do the experiences of King Canute not teach us something about that? The question is where we go from here. We should state firmly and categorically what we intend to do with our Bill. It is being introduced because we want to make our contribution to achieving a safe and sustainable level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. We should state explicitly and firmly how we have formulated our targets—in other words, we should demonstrate that we have not plucked them from thin air—and we should firmly and explicitly state that the formula that we have used is considered to be fair and reasonable; surely we would not have used it if it was not. To do those things is not to bind ourselves to an international agreement based on contraction and convergence. We should always be open to the possibility that somebody out there has devised something better, and is willing to have that idea examined and tested. It seems to me an absurdity for the Government to obfuscate the origins of our national target, as if by some freak of fate nobody could discover what those origins were. We are begging to be found out, and if we are, what will that do for our credibility? It is a strategy that invites the proposing of weaker and more fragmented frameworks. I recognise that there are many critics of contraction and convergence, and mostly those criticisms are levelled not at the need to achieve a safe and sustainable concentration level, but at the means of achieving it. As Stern found, there are great difficulties in determining what constitutes equity, and for many, the idea of a per capita share allocation is a step too far. I find it frustrating that although these criticisms are happily thrown at contraction and convergence, rarely is an alternative proposal put forward. Instead, we hear much about fairness and justice, with abundant references to the fact that the poorest, who did least to create the problem, will be the ones to suffer most from it, but these words remain frozen in air, never to be given substance or converted into hard, practical solutions. It is ironic that Ministers are reluctant to talk openly about contraction and convergence. We have a de facto contraction and convergence Bill, whose antecedents are easily traceable, and at the same time we are not proposing any other framework, at least as far as I know. The Prime Minister has single-mindedly driven the twin agendas of climate change and Africa to the top of the international agenda, but we shy away from acknowledging a widely accepted framework that is supported in many places precisely for its coherence in addressing these twin issues. It is time to see such coherence coming from the Government, too. They must propose a coherent link between these issues. What is the alternative? The G8 agreed that we should have a Kyoto replacement ready by 2009, which would allow time for its ratification by 2012. We have two years for something concrete to emerge, which is inclusive of all, seeks to solve the problem faster than we are creating it, and is coherent and fair—two concepts which, I admit, are not always found in international treaties. I assume that in the coming months and years, we will be telling others about our Climate Change Bill. We will want to display our initiative as a model, just as last week the Secretary of State told the United Nations about it. True, some people may find our proposals too difficult for them, especially if vested interests appear to be threatened, but are we then necessarily obliged to start from a lower base and hope that somehow we can make up lost ground later? That, in truth, has always been our hope—that if we do the right things, the result may be greater than the sum of its parts. The trouble is that we face a challenge that has no precedent in history, and our old way of stitching things together is hopelessly inadequate. The effort needed is immense, even if Nick Stern’s quoted cost of 1 per cent. of GDP seems so slight. Let us remember that almost 40 years ago the UN set a target for developed countries of giving 0.7 per cent. of GDP in aid, and so far only three countries have managed it. We can break the psychology that has made for failed commitments in the past by adopting a rigorous and coherent framework now. The World Resources Institute in its 2005 report ““Navigating the Numbers”” stated that"““international agreements predicated on equal per capita emission entitlements are unlikely to garner consensus””," on the grounds that countries would not accept similar obligations if they felt they would be"““significantly burdened””" with responsibility. The report nevertheless concluded:"““Considering that over the long term net emissions must fall to zero, convergence is a corollary of climate protection.””" If that is so, we must ask ourselves whether it is merely an accidental corollary or something we should plan for. If it is not something we should plan for, perhaps we could convince the developing world to shout ““Accidental equity is our right”” and see how quickly it signs up to some climate change framework involving equity by osmosis. I hope I have convinced my hon. Friend the Minister that I take the Bill very seriously. I very much welcome it, and I recognise that the Government want to go beyond the 60 per cent. target emission rate that they set in statute. So that I am not misinterpreted, I conclude by saying that the challenge is not just for the Government. It is for all parties in the House. There is no escape clause from the necessity of achieving a solution that solves the problem faster than we are creating it. The evidence is abundant that that is beyond 60 per cent. I believe the Government agree. I hope the Opposition parties also agree and do not try to make party capital out of the 60 per cent. figure. If they do try that, they are binding themselves to a higher figure, and they will have to say what that figure is and what the framework is that supports it. I look forward to my hon. Friend’s response.