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Carbon Budget Order 2011

My Lords, there is a strong danger of shooting the messenger here. One cannot criticise the Minister for bringing forward these orders at this time. They are mandated by the Climate Change Act 2008. Equally, one cannot expect the Government to do other than accept the bulk of the advice from the Committee on Climate Change since, otherwise, what would be the point of having it? However, we should not simply wade through these orders—I certainly do not want to—without registering the increasing concern in this House and outside about people becoming profoundly disillusioned by the whole framework created by the Climate Change Act. One can divide the climate change argument into three levels which broadly correspond to the three working groups of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. First, the science—what is the relationship between manmade emissions of CO2 and temperature? Secondly, on the impacts, for any given rise in temperature, what is the impact on rainfall, crops, glaciers, and sea levels et cetera? Thirdly, for any given view on temperature and impacts, are we choosing the best combination of policy measures to achieve the desired level of mitigation at least cost? For many years, perhaps reflecting my Treasury training, I was a level-three critic. I took the science and impacts as given but had serious misgivings about the suite of policy responses: for example, the balance between renewables, especially wind versus nuclear power. These orders are not the place to debate those concerns—that is for another occasion—yet one feature of the policy response is relevant to them. That is the dogged and increasing unilateralism that they embody. No other country has gone as far in building its climate change ambitions into a legal duty. No other country has set CO2 reduction targets that far into the future. For the coalition, and I suspect in particular its Liberal wing, this is a source of national pride but for many it is a cause of growing concern. For a country whose emissions account for 2 to 3 per cent of the world total, and falling, this unconditional unilateralism makes no sense. We could face double jeopardy by incurring the costs of a mandatory switch from low-cost to high-cost energy, as the policy requires, and still be left facing a bill for adaptation. There is an attempted justification in terms of green jobs but that argument is largely wishful thinking. You need to take account of the jobs that are lost before you can count any that are built up. It is particularly worrying that the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change is championing the view that the EU should move from its target of a 20 per cent reduction by 2020 to a 30 per cent reduction, as envisaged in the event of an international agreement. However, that is being done at precisely the time when those international negotiations look like crumbling. The more I studied the matter, the less confident I became in taking levels one and two for granted. At level two, there have been too many examples in the IPCC caucus of work of selective quoting from the so-called grey literature and even some outright errors. We are presented again and again with doomsday scenarios while the offsetting, positive benefits of warming are overlooked. For example, in a world which is warmer, wetter and more CO2-rich, crops and trees will grow faster. The most disgraceful example of scaremongering was by the previous Government in their notorious bedtime story video, the final scene of which showed the family dog drowning in a flood. That public money was used for such propaganda was a disgrace and I wonder which accounting officer signed that off. Having lost faith in the impacts story, my agnosticism extended into the science itself. This was triggered, first, by the flaws in governance and impropriety revealed at the climate research unit and the IPCC, and even more so by the failure of the senior figures in the science world to do anything about it. The noble Lord, Lord Reay, referred to the sentence in the order that there is an overwhelming scientific consensus that it—climate change—is being caused by human activity but, as he remarked, there is no such consensus. There is probably agreement that manmade CO2 is one of the contributory factors. Beyond that, there is huge and often violent disagreement. There is no agreement even on the most fundamental relationship in the whole system, that between CO2 and temperature—the so-called climate sensitivity. There is also disagreement about the contribution of all the other factors at work. Everywhere now, you are reading stuff about the sun and what is going on there so, clearly, to focus on manmade CO2 is only looking at part of the story. In my view, it is folly to believe that by controlling one element in the equation—manmade CO2—we can stabilise the whole climate. On these uncertain sands, a whole edifice of certainty has been constructed but the outcry in this country is growing—not just from the CBI and the energy-intensive industries but from those such as Age UK, with its concern about fuel poverty, and from those who are concerned about the waste of public money on ill-conceived subsidies, most of which are captured by the better-off. I predict that before too long, possibly when the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change is reshuffled, more sensible minds will start looking at the whole climate change framework of which these orders are a part. The noble Baroness, Lady Rendell, wrote a book called A Fatal Inversion. I believe that an inversion is taking place which could be fatal for the reputation of some people in this debate. Those who criticised the AGW consensus were portrayed as the zealots and the cranks. That is now being turned on its head and those who question the consensus are increasingly being seen as the rational moderates. It is the defenders of the consensus who are dogmatically driving the UK into ever more unilateralist positions.