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Climate Change: Copenhagen Conference

My Lords, I, too, thank the Minister for making the Statement. I echo the thoughts of the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, but I would make the point even more strongly: this conference was an absolute failure. Let us be clear about that. We did not move forward; particularly psychologically, we moved back to before Bali and all the optimism and work that had been done before Copenhagen at the end of last year. That is a great challenge and a great problem. Of all the words and phrases that could be found in the diplomatic lexicon, "accord" was chosen. It means "agreement", but agreement about what? As the Minister said in the Statement, the accord was deposited in the Library of the House. I went there earlier, as I had not read the accord word for word, and found that it had just 12 paragraphs. It contains hardly any numbers—the figure of 2 degrees at the beginning, a wish for a $30 billion transfer of funds, with $100 billion by 2020, and one other figure, which I shall come to later. That is it. There are fewer promises in it than in the Tories’ pre-election manifesto, which we heard about yesterday. That is something to beat in terms of aspirations. We have a great failure. Another thing that Copenhagen showed was a massive transfer of global power. What did we have? We had the deal led by China with South Africa, Brazil and India. Russia was not even there. More important, the European Union did not figure at all. The United States was brought in, but without the President being one to one with the Chinese Premier. That left the rest of the world and most of the nations out of the agreement. It is a major shift. I say that in great sadness. Before, we had Europe leading with a unified voice, with targets and with the desire to be legally tied to real outcomes, yet the European Union was not even part of bringing together the accord. As the Minister said, there were some good points. One that has not been mentioned was the agreement for verification across the world, particularly by China, which should, we hope, eventually make an agreement deliverable by the United States Senate. There was also the agreement straightaway for a $30 billion transfer of funds, which will primarily relate to forests. The REDD-plus agreement moved forward, which I hope will be one of the major achievements to be delivered from the conference, because if we lose rainforests they are lost for ever. We will have a debate next week, when I will broaden out some of those themes, but I should like to know from the Minister what the European Union is going to do now in relation to the reduction of 20 per cent versus 30 per cent. This agreement cannot fulfil the requirements for a 30 per cent reduction by 2020 at the European Union level. Where does Europe go from here, after this diplomatic disaster at Copenhagen? I am also interested in the Copenhagen green climate fund that it was decided should be set up. Perhaps the Minister could say a little about whether that is about to happen. Is it part of the United Nations? How does it fit in? How do we know whether this transfer will work properly? I would be interested to understand a little more about the technology transfer organisation. One of the ironies of the accord lies in paragraph 12, which says, "After we’ve done all this by 2015, we’ll then reconsider whether we should strengthen the target to 1.5 degrees, as the island nation states demanded". Of course, with the weak agreement that we have, that target has become impossible. In many ways, that is the hypocrisy of the accord.