---

Climate Change Bill [Lords]

There is a real danger of the House misleading itself into debates which, although important, are not the debates that should be taking place on the amendments. There are issues to be addressed concerning the methodology of impact assessments, but at this stage the House is being asked to address the principle of the inclusion of the Government's assessment of carbon impacts in the way in which we set our carbon budgets. It is important to bring the debate back to that. It is also important not to allow ourselves to conduct a caricature debate about the choices that we face. The choices are not between unilateralism or multilateralism, or between mitigation or adaptation. We will have to do both. When the ship is sinking, the last thing we want to hear is someone running round the decks saying, ““No action until there is a global refit.”” If the ship is sinking, we want action taken on the threat that we face at that time. What we need to recognise from the scientific reports, which have been coming to us in their own tsunamis, is that the climate and the planet are the part of the equation that is in the process of taking the most enormous unilateral action. We will have to address huge upheavals in the whole framework of how we consider societies and economies capable of working viably throughout the whole of this century. I had hoped that the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming) would be here for his customary intervention on this issue. The answer to the question about oil is that by the time we come out of the current global financial crisis, two things will be queuing up. The first will be the climate crises already in the pipeline. Secondly, by that time we will probably have passed the peak oil level anyway, and we will have to move to a post-oil economy if we want a viable economy of any sort. The question before the House is about whether it is right in principle to include aviation and shipping in how we assess carbon impact. The answer is that it has to be right. It would be absurd for the House to pretend that we can ignore the impact that aviation in particular, and shipping, have on our carbon emissions and the climate damage that we do. The right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) is right to say that there are domestic implications that need to feed back into our policy on airport expansion. It would be enormously sensible to draw airport expansion to a halt; that would give a hugely important signal to people in this country and internationally about the importance that we place on the environment being the centrepiece of any sustainable economy in the 21st century.