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Treaty of Lisbon (No. 8)

I agree with the right hon. Gentleman, and that is a good example of social justice in action. I am slightly disappointed, in reflecting on the target to meet 20 per cent. of our energy needs from renewable sources, that the UK share is less than 20 per cent, so I would agree with him about how these matters are divided up. On the occasion that he mentioned, they were divided up as he described, and in the 2020 targets, they are beginning to be divided up in the same way. The principle still applies. Another important example of UK leadership with EU backing was emissions trading. As the Secretary of State rightly said, this country established the first emissions trading scheme in the world. I remember the legislation that the House passed in order to set up the scheme, which has now become an EU-wide emissions trading scheme. It is true that there will always be difficulties in setting up a brand new scheme, and they have been adverted to in respect of phase 1 of the ETS earlier in the debate, but we are now approaching the second phase for 2008 to 2012. We appear to have learned some lessons from our experience of the first phase: caps are getting tighter and auctioning is being used as a way of distributing permits, but we have not yet seen those developments reflected in a higher carbon price going forward. By the time we get to phase 3, however, I expect that there will be very tight caps, lots of auctioning and, with that, a new challenge to consider. As people start to pay their auction prices to national Governments for their permits and as they start to pay penalties for breaching the permitted amount of emissions, those national Governments are going to receive pretty huge sums of money. I wanted to intervene earlier in the speech of the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire when she referred to the positive examples of land use, landfill and tax credits for Community benefits. She took one intervention in which reference was made to the enormous cost of helping developing countries to cope with adaptation, to which I would add the enormous cost of adapting to low carbon economies and of new technologies. We are talking about huge sums of money. The text in front of us says that we are going to commit to promote the tackling of climate change, so surely those huge sums will be applied in accordance with that text, will they not? There we see the great significance of the change in the wording that we are debating today. I urge hon. Members to accept that it is a hugely significant change that will make a great difference to the world in future. I met representatives of west midlands manufacturing businesses yesterday and we discussed the pressures of the carbon price in the EU as providing one more push to manufacturers in developed European countries to move to less developed countries where the costs are cheaper. They told MPs that we should beware of adding another push factor to the offshoring of hard-pressed businesses in this country. That is a good antidote for people who stress the urgent need to deal with environmental factors because it reminds us that sustainable development has to be viewed as a balance between three different limbs—social and economic factors as well environmental. We need to keep the three in balance. Conversely, across the EU, the low-carbon economy is helped and driven by emissions trading mechanisms, among others. There are opportunities, as the hon. Member for East Surrey (Mr. Ainsworth) mentioned, for European and British businesses to take advantage of being at the forefront of new technologies that will help the whole world to achieve a low-carbon economy. In energy efficiency, for example, condensing boilers are important and in some forms of transportation there are new ways of powering vehicles. When it comes to marine renewables, as the hon. Gentleman said, the UK is uniquely well placed within the EU to be at the forefront of such developments. Finally, as we look forward to developing those business opportunities, it is important to remember that we need intelligent regulation, not no regulation of the markets.