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Energy and Climate Change

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for calling me to speak in this debate. The international aim of limiting the impact of climate change to so-called acceptable consequences is, according to current trends, set to fail. That is notwithstanding the fact that the Energy and Climate Change Secretary told the House last Monday that the Durban climate conference"““was a clear success for international co-operation.””—[Official Report, 12 December 2011; Vol. 537, c. 569.]" The executive secretary of the UN framework convention on climate change saluted the countries that had made this agreement, but the executive director of Friends of the Earth called the Durban agreement"““an empty shell of a plan””" that"““leaves the planet hurtling towards catastrophic climate change.””" Others were even less diplomatic. The gulf between these different reactions reflects the gulf between the reality of the current political process and the reality of what the science tells us we need to do. Indeed, it says it a lot about people's expectations that, after so many climate talks and empty pledges over the years, an agreement ““in principle”” to tackling climate change from 2020 can still be hailed as an overall success. There has for a number of years been almost universal agreement on the need to keep climate change within a range that would limit its impact to a so-called acceptable level. That is the risk that Governments have decided they are willing to take on our behalf, and on the whole, the public have accepted this position in the belief that we will be spared from ““dangerous”” or ““very dangerous”” climate change. The threshold between ““acceptable”” and ““dangerous”” climate change has been the famous target of limiting warming to no more than 2° C above pre-industrial levels, which, in theory at least, is the limit that international negotiations are striving not to breach. But today the fight to ensure that the planet and its people suffer only the ““acceptable”” consequences of a warming world faces a double threat. First, Governments have so far failed to take the action needed to protect their current and future populations from the worst of climate change. Writing in the Royal Society's journal earlier this year, a group of leading climate scientists explained that ““the continued rise in greenhouse gas emissions in the past decade and the delays in a comprehensive global emissions reduction agreement have made achieving this””— 2°—"““target extremely difficult, arguably impossible, raising the likelihood of global temperature rises of 3°C or 4°C within this century.””" The consequences of the latest weak and delayed agreement are laid bare by Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the International Energy Agency, who has said:"““If we do not have an international agreement, whose effect is put in place by 2017, then the door to””—" holding temperatures to below 2° of warming—"““will be closed forever””." The second threat is that, as the latest science shows, even a 2° temperature rise is too much. Indeed, the evidence now points to the need to keep global temperature increases to less than 1.5° at most. So it is deeply worrying that, according to the world's leading climate change monitoring programme, average temperatures are 1° higher than those in the 1950s. Current research released in the run-up to the Durban conference, including work from the Potsdam institute, the Met Office's Hadley centre, the United Nations Environment Programme and the International Energy Agency, shows that on average the world is expected to warm by at least 3.5° by 2100. If that is an average, the grim reality is that some parts of the world are likely to be warming significantly more. I raise these issues because it is crucial that we base our climate policy on the best available science. The clearest expression of the accumulation of emissions and the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases was given by the European Environment Agency. The latest data show a concentration of 399 parts per million of CO2 equivalent. The UK's current carbon budgets, which theoretically aim for a less than 2° temperature rise, are based on greenhouse gas concentrations stabilising at 450 parts per million of CO2 equivalent, but even that level in no way guarantees protection. The Inter- governmental Panel on Climate Change's fourth assessment report makes it clear that if global CO2 equivalent concentrations are stabilised about 450 parts per million, the risk of exceeding a 2° warming is about 50%. In other words, that is the equivalent of getting on a plane with only a 50:50 chance of it not falling out of the sky. It is crucial that we make sure that our policy is based on the latest science. My speech is not the usual kind of intervention where we are scoring political points and focusing on short-term tactical question. I believe and I hope that I am doing something more important than that. I am putting on the record the fact that we face a climate crisis of extraordinary urgency, and if we are to have any hope of tackling it, we need to be working on the basis of the right data. So I have three questions for the Minister to answer. First, will he agree to examine the latest science, and, as necessary, work to change the UK's domestic targets to ensure that they continue to respect the political and public consensus to limit climate change to ““acceptable”” consequences? Secondly, will he ensure that the Government take the action needed to limit our emissions in time and in line with our global responsibilities to prevent climate change reaching dangerous levels—and that means including the emissions that are embedded in imports? Thirdly, will he fight on the international stage to do everything possible to ensure that all Governments take the same approach? If we continue to fiddle while not only Rome, but the whole planet burns, we will go down in whatever history can follow us as the species that spent all its time monitoring its own extinction, rather than taking active steps to avoid it. The Government say that there is no plan B on the economy. That is debatable, but the fact that there is no planet B is not.