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Climate Change (Political Response)

I shall try to make some progress now, but I shall try to take Members’ interventions a little later. How would I sum up the situation? There is a huge gap between ambition, practical vision and delivery on the ground, and there is a woeful mismatch between the debate in the UK about the political response to climate change so far and what has happened in the past. The bottom line is that the Conservatives have had enough of well-meaning but unambitious small-scale tinkering with the energy markets; we have had enough of complicated overlapping initiatives and regulation that would leave would-be entrepreneurs and investors in our green economy scratching their heads; we have had enough of sham green taxation that raised money for the Treasury without any clear green outcome—and we have had enough of a Government who could not make up their mind on coal or carbon capture and storage, had to be forced into feed-in tariffs and have no real strategy on heat and energy efficiency. Our low-carbon economy paper brings together all those elements in a coherent and ambitious strategy. It is a route to a transformation of the UK. It is not a wish list of targets and frameworks with no delivery; it is a plan for action which will be at the heart of the next Conservative manifesto.