Climate Change: Targets

Question for Short Debate

Asked by

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to ensure that legislation aligns with their ambition for the United Kingdom to be a global leader in achieving its climate change targets.

My Lords, I start by thanking all noble Lords who will be speaking in this debate. I look forward to their contributions, which will fill in some of the gaps left by mine.

This year presents a unique opportunity for the UK to really grasp the nettle of collaborative global action on climate change. It is an existential issue for our planet and we owe it to our children and future generations to get this right. For us to lead the world we must, when all eyes are on us, present a clean domestic scene, which means some good housekeeping. My husband will testify that I am no domestic goddess but I can dust—maybe not behind fridges—and I can hoover a bit. So let me tell noble Lords why I think a bit of housekeeping is in order.

During my time as Lib Dem spokesperson for international development I came across various anomalies, the most egregious of which was the fact that at the same time as we were spending ODA to combat dreadful climate-related disasters overseas, such as the effect of famine in the Sahel due to increasing desertification, we were also investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure in Africa and elsewhere in the world, including in the North Sea. What really struck home was the injustice of those least responsible for climate chaos being the ones who suffer most.

According to Global Justice Now, since the 2015 Paris Agreement was signed, approximately £568 million of UK aid has been invested in fossil fuel projects overseas. If we include export credits provided by UK Export Finance for fossil fuels, that figure rises to £3.9 billion. This makes a nonsense of our commitments to tackling climate change—not just the Paris Agreement but the sustainable development goals and our own Climate Change Act. We cannot be serious about keeping global temperature rises to between 1.5 and 2 degrees centigrade, or about domestic net-zero targets, if we continue to export fossil fuel infrastructure, the ultimate source of the problems we face today.

The situation is worse than that. Our domestic legislation has incoherencies that reverberate here at home. In 2019 I tabled my Private Member’s Bill, the Petroleum (Amendment) Bill, the essential aim of which was to stop the issuance of new licences for oil and gas exploration, to put in place plans to safeguard jobs and livelihoods of communities as we start to phase out existing fossil fuel infrastructure, and to stop UK support for new fossil fuel projects abroad.

For now, I will focus on what is happening here at home. Existing legislation currently pulls government Ministers in different, incompatible directions. For example, the Petroleum Act 1998, as amended by the Infrastructure Act 2015, confers a duty on the Oil and Gas Authority to maximise revenues from petroleum, while the Climate Change Act commits Governments to aim for a target of net-zero carbon by 2050. To tidy up this anomaly, my Private Member’s Bill proposes that the Petroleum Act 1998 be amended so that its principal objective is no longer maximising economic recovery of UK petroleum, but instead is aligned to the otherwise competing statutory aim for a target of net-zero carbon by 2050 in the Climate Change Act 2008, as amended in 2019.

My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, for securing and introducing this important debate.

The climate crisis is the single greatest long-term challenge we face. We know the importance of aligning legislation with our climate change targets. We noticed recently, however, that some legislation was absent from the recent Queen’s Speech; in particular, the energy Bill was not included. Only a couple of months ago, the Minister himself said:

“The government intends to bring forward an Energy Bill as soon as parliamentary time allows. The Energy Bill will aim to enable progress to be made on commitments made by the Prime Minister in his Ten Point Plan as well as deliver policy commitments set out in the Energy White Paper.”

What happened? Will progress now be stifled rather than enabled without it? Regardless, the central challenge is whether targets are matched by the scale of action required in this decisive decade. The biggest concern is the growing evidence that there is a wide gap between rhetoric and reality. We are way off meeting our fifth and sixth carbon targets. The Green Alliance estimates that policy announcements will lead to only 26% of the reductions necessary to get the UK on track for 2030. How far off does the Minister think we are from meeting our fifth and sixth carbon budgets?

We desperately need a comprehensive plan for the massive task of retrofitting and changing the way we heat millions of homes, with the finance to back it up. The heat and building strategy was supposed to be published this year, but it has been delayed and delayed. Can the Minister promise that when it is finally published, it will contain the plan we need? The Treasury’s crucial net-zero review was due in autumn 2020, then promised in spring 2021. It is still not delivered. When will it finally see the light of day? From the underinvestment in hydrogen to the uncertainty of when 60% of our offshore wind will be domestic, the examples go on and on. Ultimately, we need a comprehensive green new deal. Only this will allow the UK to meet its climate change targets.

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, for securing this very helpful debate.

I have raised on several occasions the urgent need for the Government to publish their hydrogen strategy, which presumably will require legislation to put into effect. As Bill Gates said in his book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, significant investment in research into new technologies will be necessary if we are to reach net zero by our target date. He also said that some of the investments will be very costly and high risk; therefore, they will have to be funded by Governments. He also said that private investment will do lots of the heavy lifting in terms of investment, given appropriate government support. Does the Minister agree with Bill Gates’s assessment? Do the Government yet have a date for the publication of their long-awaited hydrogen strategy to move things along? Does the Minister understand the urgency of this issue? I am sure he does.

Another very important issue is the size of the hydrogen target by 2030. Why is this country’s target so low, at five gigawatts? This is the same as for Scotland alone, for example. Can we really not do better than that? The Government have claimed that their forthcoming hydrogen target will be world-leading—really? If so, some urgent work surely needs to be done to revise substantially upwards the five-gigawatt target. Finally, the energy White Paper set a target of one gigawatt of low-carbon hydrogen by 2025. Can the Minister spell out how the Government expect to meet this target? Is he content that the target is adequate if we are to achieve our final target for 2030? The Minister knows that this country has a brilliant opportunity to create lots of high-quality jobs across the UK in the hydrogen industry. I would be grateful if the Minister could give the House a clear indication of when the hydrogen strategy will finally be published.

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, on calling this debate and on her excellent introduction. In my brief time today, I would like to urge the Government to consider the use of pension scheme assets in our battle against climate change. They are the ideal long-term capital source to mitigate risks and prepare for both the known and unknown unknowns that we are facing. Climate change is potential catastrophe, both for us and for countries globally, and for future generations. We perhaps have an opportunity, if my noble friend agrees, to use our huge sums—more than £1 trillion—in pension assets, which are significantly larger than those in most other countries, to build back better; to ensure that traditional investments in global industries do not become worthless in the transition to low-carbon economies; and to address some of the inconsistencies in our policy stance, outlined by the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan. Pension assets could support a hydrogen strategy; they could encourage fossil fuel reduction and encourage traditional energy companies to diversify and build alternative sources of energy before their assets become stranded. The noble Lord, Lord Oates, has been working on some of this for a while and talking about capital requirements and risk-weighting for such assets. I would be grateful if my noble friend could give the Committee his thoughts on those.

I have two further quick points. Do the Government have targets for building new, eco-friendly homes, especially for older people to downsize to, while ensuring that existing housing stocks can be retrofitted and upgraded to be more energy efficient? Do the Government have plans to ban cryptocurrencies from all regulated activities, given the measure of carbon emissions entailed in this socially worthless exercise?

My Lords, I declare my interest as co-chair of Peers for the Planet and add my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, on her ongoing work in this area. This week we have seen a spotlight on disaster planning and crisis management. In climate change, we face an even greater potential catastrophe than Covid—what the Government themselves this week called the planet’s greatest threat. We need a response that is comprehensive, systemic and integrated, and brings together disparate contributions from many sectors into a coherent whole. It requires leadership from the Government, and a climate lens on all policies and legislation, if we are to ensure delivery not only of our domestic agenda but of our international aims for COP 26, leading, in the words of President Biden,

“by the power of our example.”

In regard to legislation, we are not there yet. Two crucial Bills in the last Session contained no reference to climate obligations whatever until changes were made in this House. That problem continues in this Session, with silence on the issue of climate in the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill and a potential lack of consonance between the Environment Bill and the planning reform Bill.

Can the Minister say today how the Government intend to ensure early and comprehensive scrutiny of all policies and legislation against their green agenda? Are they, for example, looking at the work being done in this area by other countries such as New Zealand and Sweden? Finally, can he assure me that the Cabinet Committee on Climate Change, which has met so infrequently, will now be fully engaged in leading the systemic co-ordination and integration that is so urgent?

While there is no doubt about the ultimate objective of our climate change agenda, there are many choices—some very expensive, and some improbable of coming to fruition. People with possible solutions are keen to sell but, drawing on recent experience with the supply of PPE and ventilators during the pandemic, a willingness to sell does not equal a willingness to sell the right product at a competitive price.

How do Her Majesty’s Government propose to rank ideas as to their cost and deliverability? Are they aiming to establish a hierarchy of schemes to which resources should be targeted? I am anxious that we gather lower-hanging fruit first, because that has the greatest effect. I remind the Minister of the interest I expressed the last time we spoke in whether Ofgem’s objectives do in fact conform to the objectives of the Government’s policy on climate change.

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, for securing this debate and particularly for the way that she framed it as ensuring that legislation aligns. That seems to point us towards the Queen’s Speech and the need to mainstream climate and environmental issues in everything.

I want to pick out three Bills from the Speech, two obvious, one less obvious. The noble Lord, Lord Lennie, referred to the lack of an energy Bill in the Speech, although there is of course a Bill addressing energy, the draft downstream oil resilience Bill—so the only energy Bill we have is about oil. It talks about working with the sector and, in particular, about transferring to abatement technologies. Will the Minister acknowledge that the Bill is talking about the hard, inefficient way to store carbon? What we have with carbon capture and storage is oil, gas and coal in the ground—and leaving it in the ground is by far the cheapest and most efficient way to store carbon.

I move on to the planning Bill. This seems to divide the country into two areas: open-slather development in some parts, with a few other parts protected. It is a “sparing and sharing” approach. Yet we have seen the Government recently adopt—after a great deal of campaigning—a new nature target, which would seem utterly incompatible with allowing any more trashing of our desperately nature-depleted country.

Finally, like the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, I come to the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill. I spent this morning talking first to the Westminster Food & Nutrition Forum about food security and then to Building magazine about a national retrofitting strategy. Both stressed the need for skills, the need for people and the terrible shortage of labour supply. This Bill contains plans for a flexible, lifelong loan scheme. We need these workers and these skills; surely with education being a public good, we should not be asking people to take on the weight of loans—to have debt hanging around their neck as a burden. Surely, to deliver our climate and nature targets, we should be looking to fund this education from public spending.

My Lords, I add my congratulations to those offered to the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, on securing this important debate. There is no greater challenge facing humanity than containing and reducing global warming. I want to focus the lens on maritime, an area of significant challenge but one of great opportunity for the UK. Before I start, I pay tribute to the Minister, who kindly made time to meet me and some maritime colleagues last year—here, I should declare my unremunerated maritime interests as declared in the register promoting the UK’s maritime industries.

Maritime is now, very properly, being brought into government legislative requirements. The industry is committed to playing its part. Although it can be said that maritime is a lesser sinner in terms of emissions per tonne mile of freight moved, due to the scale of the industry, it has been estimated that it accounts for 2.5% to 3% of global emissions. It is early days, and the technology for zero-carbon main engines has not yet been commercialised. An additional challenge is to lay on power at ports to supply ships that are alongside with electricity.

So far, the Government have awarded £3 million to the maritime research and innovation institute and have set up a £20 million clean maritime demonstration competition, which is currently open. These initiatives are of course welcome to the industry. I should also mention one significant example of government support: £30 million from BEIS for a Strength in Places bid from Artemis in Belfast to build high-tech ferries. This is not specifically a green investment, but I believe there will be a green beneficial outcome.

These investments represent a start, but they are small and must be regarded as only a start, and they are less than those of competitor states. If we are to be successful in meaningfully reducing carbon output from shipping, a fundamental problem that we face is that vessel charterers and users are unlikely to pay for expensive new ships with as yet untried technologies, with owners therefore discouraged from investing. Carbon pricing is the elephant in the room. The industry needs urgently to know what form carbon pricing in the UK will take. It is essential that any funds realised from the maritime sector are reinvested in shipping and maritime.