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Carbon Budget Order 2011

My Lords, I am very interested to follow the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull. He talked about agnosticism and it seems that we are in the area of faith. The Americans believe ““In God we trust””, as they say on their dollar, while here we are saying, ““In certain elements of science, we either trust or we do not trust””. I am grateful for the explanations offered in the notes and I was interested to see the estimate given of the cost that might be incurred by this fourth budget. It is stated as a least-cost path of £1.9 billion with a top figure of £7 billion, if we attempt to reach it purely through cutting emissions within the UK. I do not know whether this is of any comfort to the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, but the 55 million tonnes that are mentioned in the Explanatory Note on the credit limit order—in a sort of back-of-the-envelope calculation, as far as I can see—are about 5 per cent of the total non-EU carbon credits that will be required. That is a pretty marginal effort. However, that raises a question about the statement in the Explanatory Memorandum, which states that we are, "““currently working with EU partners to try to secure an EU 2020 reduction target of 30%””." The noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, brought that up. I would be interested to know whether my noble friend the Minister could tell the House what stage that has reached. I hope he might accept that the marginal abatement cost goes up with each increase in the reduction target. Are there any figures of what they estimate this beefed-up target might incur? There is a question as to whether this credit limit on non-EU certified emission reductions includes any allowance to accommodate the revision in the EU target. As we said before, it is such a small element of the thing overall but it might have to be part of the review that has been mentioned.