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Climate Change Bill [HL]

I thank the Minister for defining the basis on which we are looking at the matter when he spoke about the IPCC and the Kyoto agreement. I almost feel that we ought to have that in the Bill to explain that that is what we relate this whole to. It is difficult to get the public to understand this because we are talking about generating carbon which has not been emitted. You cannot say, ““I have captured that carbon and there it is, you can weigh it””. We are not even giving people bits of paper but credits on an international database. There is a worry about whether these things are properly verified at source or whether somebody in the depths of a jungle somewhere is churning them out and feeding them into the database. The Minister needs to explain in a little more detail—perhaps not tonight but some other time—why the net UK carbon account referred to in Clause 22 does not mean that in future somebody might think that it applies only to carbon. We have tabled this amendment because we want to make sure that these other gases can be included in the net UK carbon account at the levels at which they are internationally recognised as having a carbon equivalent. At the moment there is a slight danger that the Bill’s wording does not allow for that.