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Climate Change Bill [HL]

The noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, has provoked me into rising a second time, which is unusable—I should have said unusual, but it is probably unusable too—but permissible in Committee. He implied that all we had to achieve was a target of 2 per cent per annum for 40 years and, bingo, we would be there. But it will not work like that. The climate change committee will have an enormously complex task. I suspect we shall find that initially the progress will be slow because so many things will have to be put in place. We are where we are and we have a difficult economy to control and seasonal and market factors come into play. However, I am fairly confident that the faster we go, the faster we will be able to go. Possibly, for the first year or two, the target ought to be 1 per cent only, or something of that order. If you look at the record of our energy consumption for the past 30 years, you will see that our energy efficiency has increased enormously, as has our output, and that our actual energy consumption has floated along more or less on a flat line graph. It is a very interesting graph which we need to consider much more deeply. Once we begin to change technology, which we shall have to do, the initial steps will be slow. However, once they begin to build, we will go quicker and quicker and in the later stages of our progress I suspect that we may well find that the climate change committee will say, ““Okay, we can go at 5 per cent per annum””. That will be perfectly acceptable because the changes will be in motion. It certainly will not be a straight line graph and if anybody thinks that it will be, they are daydreaming.