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Climate Change Bill [Lords]

This, internationally, is a groundbreaking Bill, which if we give it teeth, could also be an Earth-changing one. I am pleased that tonight's debate has not turned into a parliamentary love-in to welcome the Bill, because the purpose of Second Reading must be for us to set out the basis on which to have serious arguments among ourselves about the deficiencies of the Bill. Those arguments may then be rehearsed in Committee, but ultimately they will be tested back in this Chamber on Report. We need to be honest about a determination on the part of the House to make this a Bill with teeth. The context in which the debate is taking place is a world spinning into a multiplicity of crises. We face not only the climate crunch, but a credit crunch, a food security crunch, a water supply crunch and an oil crunch. We are told by the International Energy Agency that oil prices are expected to exceed $150 a barrel within a month. We have been warned by OPEC of the likelihood that oil prices will exceed $200 a barrel by the end of the year. That will have a huge and unavoidable impact on food prices, food supply, energy and production. Those are non-negotiable changes against which we are trying to deal with this Bill. The real danger globally is that we may face a series of meltdowns in global systems. If that is the case, we will be forced into a fundamental rethink about how a world that can support human life can work. The scientific consensus is that there tends to be a 30-year delay in the environmental impact of the damage that we do now. So for the next 30 years, we cannot undo the damage that is in the pipeline: we are stuck with it. Whether the changes are driven by human impacts or solar cycles, the rate of environmental damage is accelerating. The challenge is what we do to address that. We should not be arguing about the 2050 targets, but about the 2015 or 2020 targets. That is what the scientists told us in Bali. Fundamentally, the whole shape of this century will be determined by what we do within the next five years, or 10 at the most. A figure of 26 per cent. carbon savings by 2020 is 10 per cent. short of what we need, so we need to raise the short-term targets. The lesson that the Government have to learn is that when we have been shy about setting tough year-on-year achievement targets, we miss the milestones that we set for ourselves—on child poverty and fuel poverty eradication for the most vulnerable by 2010. Unless we take the hard decisions now, we may not be in a position to take any meaningful decisions by 2020. We have to address new realities about the nature of the crunch. One is that everything that is non-renewable and depleting will spiral in price from now on. If there is anything that stands a chance of saving the poor it is a fundamental shift towards the sustainable and the renewable. I must disagree with several parts of the Bill. The first is mandatory reporting standards. We cannot have an objective shift on the scale that we need if everyone is making up the standards as they go along. If even the CBI says that it supports that, so must we. The second is targets and how we meet them. The targets have to be domestic. We have to move away from the presumption that we can pay someone else to meet them. If a Member of Parliament were stopped by the police and found to be driving three times over the alcohol limit, they could not give the excuse that although they might be blind drunk at the wheel, they had sponsored a man in Botswana to stay at home sober. That would not get them off the rack. We have to be held to account for the dangers that we present in how we drive our economy, as we are when we drive our cars. We are the danger on the road to survival and we have to change our behaviour ourselves. The third area is aviation and shipping, which have to be added to the Bill, even if we simply factor in their carbon impact. If the Government insist that those two sectors have to have their impact covered by other people, at least their impact has to be added to the equation, as the royal commission required in 2000. Trading emissions is the Mickey Mouse idea of our time. A study of the effectiveness of CFC and HFC reduction programmes in the developing world found that they cost $5 billion in carbon credits, but it would have cost $100 million just to give the countries the money to do the clean-up directly. We need to choose the transparent and the simple method, not the complex and speculative. The issue on reporting is not the competence, integrity or commitment of DEFRA Ministers. It is the commitment of the Government as a whole. In that context, everyone knows that the obstacles will not come from officials in DEFRA. They will come from the Treasury, which is where they have always come from. If anyone is going to throw a spanner in the works, it is the Treasury. If that is the case, the person who has to be accountable is the Prime Minister. This is about leadership from the Government as a whole. If the Prime Minister wants to take hold of the issue and say to the House and to the country, ““The buck stops here””, the response that he will get from outside is, ““You bet your life it does!””