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Climate Change Bill [Lords]

The right hon. Gentleman is spot on; I absolutely agree. The Department for Transport's policy on airport expansion and our failure to give a lead in Europe are riding roughshod over Government policy in DEFRA. We have talked about how much of the effort has to be made domestically. The Government have said how great it is that we have had all this parliamentary scrutiny, but most of the big changes are going to be taken out again. That is not my understanding of the meaning of scrutiny. The Government want to get through the whole Committee stage in less than two and a half weeks. We are told that this is the biggest issue facing the future of the planet, but two and a half weeks is supposed to be long enough to kick it around. This Bill needs serious scrutiny. Members in the other place were right to come up with the limit on the extent to which we can buy in. We need an overwhelmingly domestic effort on cutting carbon emissions. As the Conservative spokesman said, quoting Scottish and Southern, there is a strong case for our taking the lead in this respect. In a different section of its briefing, it said:"““Emissions trading is a cost effective way of reducing emissions for countries who have difficulties in delivering their own emissions reductions, but the UK is blessed with the greatest potential resource of renewable energy in Europe””." In other words, there may be countries that cannot make the transition quickly enough and need to buy in from elsewhere, but we are not one of them. We have huge potential to do the job ourselves, to take a lead, and to be a great green-collar-job economy, but we are missing it. I understand that the Danish economy now gets more money from the sale of renewable energy and renewables than it does from selling bacon—unless the Danes are telling porkies, that is. There is huge potential in this area. The worry about buying in carbon reductions is that it means that money flows out of the UK, sometimes to schemes such as the clean development mechanism where there are concerns about their certification. We could be investing and locking ourselves into a low-carbon economy, yet we are putting off the evil day and potentially saying yes to new high-carbon technologies such as new coal-fired power stations. That must be the wrong route. The UK could be a leader instead of trying to buy its way out of trouble.