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Climate Change Bill [Lords]

I welcome new clause 15 and pay tribute to the work of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, East and Saddleworth (Mr. Woolas) not only on the Bill but on raising the issue of aviation and shipping on the international stage. We all know that that is where it has to be raised. We recognise the need to count in the emissions from aviation and shipping, but we all accept that calculating how to apportion them to individual countries is fraught with difficulty. As our Climate Change Bill is often referred to as a world first, it is crucial that we include aviation and shipping. We do not want to give other people the idea that those matters can be left out of legislation. They should be included because we need to raise consciousness among many other nations that may follow suit by producing similar legislation. However, we realise that there is still an enormous amount of work to be done to reach an international agreement about how any mechanism might work, and we still need to work hard on the international stage in many other spheres. We all recognise that what we do here can be worth while only if it is mirrored elsewhere in the world. We certainly might be able to use a system involving sectoral emissions, but we must remember that one problem with the EU emissions trading system is that we sometimes lose manufacturing industry from this country because it relocates to a country where the emissions trading scheme does not require it to meet our standards. We may find that, in the aviation and shipping industries, transport routes and refuelling stops become much more about avoiding the emissions being counted than about producing the lowest possible emissions. Our Bill is also important because we do not see it merely as a legal sanction. Once we have exceeded targets, it is too late—those emissions are out there and causing damage. We should see the Bill as an important monitoring tool and as a process rather than as an end in itself.