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Climate Change Bill [Lords]

The hon. Gentleman is exactly right. The Peterhead project was a classic example of the Government sending precisely the wrong signals. Although the Minister seemed to disagree with this earlier, it is clear from talking to BP that the Peterhead project was stopped as a direct result of the announcements relating to the Government's own competition. That meant that the opportunity to use some of those gasfields for carbon storage is lost for ever, because once capped, the gasfields are almost impossible to exploit. It was a terrible decision, and it meant that projects such as the one at Peterhead, which would probably have been on line and functioning by about 2011, were stopped and replaced by a competition that was unlikely to produce anything before 2014 at the earliest. The Government have produced a carbon capture strategy that is too narrowly focused on post-combustion technology, too miserly and too unambitious in its scale. That is a great shame. If the decisions relating to Kingsnorth are anything to go by, it is clear that the current framework of the emissions trading scheme is, almost by definition, insufficient to drive us towards a low carbon economy. The fact that Kingsnorth is to go ahead when its carbon emissions will be 70 per cent. higher than the nearest commercial equivalent is almost proof of the inadequacy of the ETS. The Minister seemed to suggest that we should not talk about technologies that had to be retro-fitted more expensively to old power stations, while ignoring the fact that if Kingsnorth is allowed to go ahead without locking in carbon capture and storage in some form, even if it is only in financial form rather than in technical form to start with, carbon capture and storage will have to be retro-fitted to an old coal-fired power station. That is what Kingsnorth will be—a dinosaur from a bygone age—by the time carbon capture and storage is ready. Perhaps all this is a legacy of the Secretary of State's predecessor in the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform in its previous incarnation. The hon. Member for Croydon, North (Malcolm Wicks) as the Energy Minister was an amiable Minister to have on board in these debates, but he did not give much away and DBERR was clearly pointing in the wrong direction on such issues. Now that the new Secretary of State has responsibility for energy policy as well, I would urge him to add carbon capture and storage to the long list of welcome modifications—we would not dare to call them U-turns—that he is adding to Government policy. To say that the Conservative party had a slightly mixed record on some of these issues might be a little churlish in the circumstances, although I would point out to the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker) the failure of his colleagues consistently to support the Californian model that was put forward in an amendment tabled by the Liberal Democrats to the Energy Bill in the summer. He probably ought to look carefully at the voting record of the Conservative group on Kent county council on the subject of Kingsnorth, as well. However, the hon. Gentleman made clear his position today, and we welcome him on the increasingly crowded road to Damascus. He said that the Conservatives would put the greenhouse gas limit at Kingsnorth at 500 g per kilowatt-hour. If that is the case, he was wise not to specify the exact limit in the new clause. We would have had some difficulty supporting it at such a high level. Our preference is for a lower limit—to judge from the nods from some on the Government Benches, I suspect that others might agree with me—of about 350 g per kilowatt-hour, which would direct investors towards alternative gas-fired power stations if no unabated coal-fired power stations were viable.