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Climate Change Bill [Lords]

As has already been made clear, it is not in the IPCC reports, which err on the side of conservatism and are entirely consensual. However, everybody knows that there are step-change events that could completely transform the situation—for example, if the Amazon rainforest burned or if the Arctic tundra melted and released the enormous quantities of methane trapped in it; methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that would ratchet up the greenhouse effect enormously. Enough of the flat-earthers—let us go with the majority for the moment and deal with the Bill. The Bill is a collection of aspirations. By itself, it does not legislate for the saving of a single tonne of CO2. It needs some nuts and bolts. As my hon. Friend the Member for City of York (Hugh Bayley) said, we must have concrete measures to make it work. Fortunately, other legislative vehicles are kicking around. The Energy Bill, for example, is now in the House of Lords. I am sad that, so far, we have missed an opportunity for advance through that Bill; it does nothing like enough to promote the deployment of renewable energy in Britain. We are in the unique position of having magnificent raw sources of renewable energy, and there is no more effective weapon against climate change and CO2 emissions than the maximum deployment of renewable energy. I confidently expect those omissions to be corrected in the Lords by various amendments, and I hope that the Government will accept them when the Bill comes back so that we can start to deploy renewable energy much faster and more effectively. If we are going to do anything, we have to make a dramatic step change in our whole approach to climate change. It is no good assuming, as clause 1 does, that we can legislate for a 2° C limit on global warming. The range of variability in the correlation between levels of CO2, or CO2 equivalents, and temperature rises has such a wide margin of error that 2° C is at the lower end of the range. The only answer is to take a precautionary approach and to reduce as fast as we can as effectively as we can. That is why we cannot mess about with this. The flat earth society is very concerned about the economic impact, but that pales into insignificance if the world becomes uninhabitable—there ain't much of an economy in an uninhabitable world. In future, on every measure that the Government introduce we must carry out not only a regulatory impact assessment but a climate change impact assessment, and we need to try to ensure that that assessment is always on the positive side. I believe that we should not wait for the Committee on Climate Change to increase the central target to at least 80 per cent., with concomitant increases in the interim targets, but, rather, should do so during the passage of the Bill. In the light of current evidence, it is inconceivable that the committee would recommend anything less. We all know that the sooner one takes action—the sooner a tonne of CO2 is saved—the more effective it is. I very much hope that we can go to the higher targets right now. We should ensure that at least 70 per cent. of CO2 emissions are saved within country. There is an awful lot of doubt about clean development mechanism credits and so on. They have been seriously abused, and there is a real possibility that if we place too much emphasis on buying credits we will not save any CO2 at all. Equally, I have a very qualified faith in trading mechanisms. One of my criticisms of the Bill is that it places far too much reliance on trading mechanisms and not enough on physical mechanisms such as exploiting renewable energy. Markets never delivered anything except money into rich men's pockets.