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Climate Change Bill [Lords]

I will try to keep my remarks brief. The hon. Member for South Swindon (Anne Snelgrove) mentioned several of her constituents; perhaps I should start by mentioning one of mine. Sir David King is the former chief scientific adviser who got into a lot of trouble for describing climate change as the most dangerous challenge facing the world. He said that it was more dangerous than terrorism. This week, above all weeks, it is worth repeating that remark, and never mind the trouble that it got him into. He was right. The scale of the problem that we face is the equivalent of the challenge that was posed by nuclear war. It might be happening more slowly and in a different way, but it is the same sort of thing. We have discovered that human beings have the capacity to undermine in its entirety the life support system on which we all depend. There are a few sceptics around, but they are increasingly like those who believe in UFOs and aliens. They are relying on smaller and smaller pieces of evidence, with wilder and wilder theories, while all around them shuffle in embarrassment and change the subject. There is a difference between scepticism, which is appropriate to science, and obduracy, which is not. Now is the time to act. A remark was made about the press, especially the tabloid press and the irresponsibility of some of its coverage. For me, that just illustrates why it is important that we should not be ruled by them. There have been big changes to the Bill since it was presented to the pre-legislative Joint Committee on which I and many others served. In the vast majority of cases, those amendments have been for the good—especially those passed in the House of Lords. I was disappointed by the Government's attitude to several of them, however. One of the crucial changes in the House of Lords was to clause 1, which introduces the 2° C target. That is important because it is as near as we can get to what we are talking about. We are trying to stop the harm caused by climate change, and that harm is measured by the change in average temperatures. It is not measured by reductions in emissions. It is measured by the outcomes—the temperature—not the inputs. The Government's argument against that way of framing the Bill is that global temperature is not under our control, because it is a matter for international action, but we have to take responsibility for our share and we have to set an example. It is a simple moral principle that we should act in a way that would be acceptable if everybody else acted in that way as well.