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Energy and Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. I hope that the Secretary of State took away several points from the exhibition. Exciting as the development of renewables is, it will not replace oil and gas soon in investment, jobs, tax revenue or exports. That will take some years—but if we run them in tandem, we can build one up as the other declines. Renewable technology will require a number of push-and-pull measures to realise its full potential. For both of them, we require substantial onshore investment in ports and transport infrastructure. As a representative of part of the city of Aberdeen, I am concerned that our infrastructure is not appropriate for a city that claims to be the energy capital of Europe. Our promised bypass has not happened, our commuter rail service has been postponed indefinitely, our city finances are in a considerable mess and we have the two most underfunded councils in Scotland, with money being diverted to other parts of the country. In those circumstances, my message to the Secretary of State—and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland—is that it is the UK Government who stand to lose if that infrastructure is not right, because some of the investment will go out of the UK altogether. I welcome several of the proposals in the Queen's Speech to promote marine energy and to support home energy efficiency, which can help move us away from dependency on the national grid and huge power stations, and make microgeneration genuinely part of the national grid, rather than just a domestic alternative to current generation. As I keep asking at every event I attend, when will we get micro combined heat and power? What steps will be taken to provide an easy way for people to take up feed-in tariffs? I defer to the point made by the hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead) about renewable heat, which is part and parcel of that issue. What can be done to help people with hard-to-heat homes—a question asked earlier by my hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes)? We have many such in Aberdeen, and they are expensive and difficult to tackle. I would like to address the international dimension. I am a vice chairman of GLOBE UK and GLOBE International, which played an invaluable role in testing potential policies and negotiating positions in the run up to the various climate change summits. In fact, in advance of Copenhagen, GLOBE clearly identified China's concerns, through the climate change dialogue that we run.