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Climate Change (Political Response)

I fully endorse the 10:10 campaign and proposals, and I hope that the House will fully endorse them and sign up to them tonight. The Government are right that we need more than a one-year strategy, because we have to have a strategy that takes us through to 2020, but the most important part of the imperative in signing up to the campaign has not come from any argument in this House; it came in September from Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He gave us all the starkest warning—the shot across the bows—when he said that it would not be enough for the world to aim to restrict carbon emissions to 450 ppm. If we wish to keep climate change to within a 2° C rise this century, the practical limit will have to be 350 ppm. We are already at 385 ppm and the question is: how do we row back from that? The starting point is now. Rajendra Pachauri urged on us the point that what we do in the next three years will determine the shape of so much that follows. I am therefore happy to sign up to the belief that we need to set a 10 per cent. target for the coming year, and probably for the year after and the year after that—for at least the five years that follow. It is not a question of what the political will requires; it is an acknowledgement that the world will not wait. The two most important parts of the motion before us, on which I shall focus, are first, the significance of the built environment, and secondly, the mechanisms that will drive us into a renewable energy future. The point has already been made that the built environment contributes 60 per cent. of our carbon emissions. If we were to set the targets that would meet our legally binding obligation to eradicate fuel poverty in Britain by 2016, we would have to set a standard assessment procedure rating for housing of 81, and establish a building renewal programme of about £4 billion a year between now and 2016. It is a lot of money, but we could save that amount in respect of many speculative schemes that cost the Government, the taxpayer and the bill payer far more. If we were to do that, what we would achieve? The figures that have been provided to the House are staggering. If we were to set up that programme, we would take 81 per cent. of the fuel poor out of poverty by 2015. In doing so, we would reduce the terawatt hours of energy consumption by 48.1 TWh. That would mean a percentage reduction in energy consumption of 56 per cent. and a reduction in carbon emissions of 59 per cent. People talk about the 10 per cent. commitment at a personal level; this is 10 per cent. at a collective level, which at the same time as saving carbon and saving the planet, would take the poor out of fuel poverty—an adaptation measure that saved lives.