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Department of Energy and Climate Change

My Lords, there are advantages in bringing together two intertwined issues such as energy and climate change, but there is an important proviso, which is that no one faction within a department becomes dominant and drowns out the voice of the other. I regret that this happened once in my experience in the early days of the Department for the Environment, Transport and the Regions. The roads voice was largely suppressed, and it took many years before we returned to a more balanced policy. Secondly, I welcome the creation of feed-in tariffs as an additional instrument, but with the caveat that care will be needed with the price that is set. Otherwise, in the metric of cost per tonne of CO2 avoided, we could find ourselves paying a lot more than we need, compared with other instruments that we could be using. My third observation is about the 80 per cent target. Because we are expecting GDP to be growing over this period, the reduction is not 80 per cent but, in terms of grams of CO2 per dollar of GDP, we will need to reduce carbon by something like 95 per cent. In other words, we will have to run our whole society on about 5 per cent of the carbon that we use at present. That is a massive task, so it is essential that we bring others along with us. Otherwise we will have the double jeopardy of paying to decarbonise our economy and paying to raise our sea defences.