My Lords, how appropriate that this debate should be scheduled on the day after President Trump told the world to grow up, play fair, pay its own way and become self-reliant. The stark reality is that the UK cannot become self-reliant with the most expensive energy in the OECD, hence the title of this debate: that this House takes note of the affordability of achieving the net-zero emissions target by 2050.
I begin by illuminating your Lordships’ House on my personal position on net zero. First, I am not a climate change denier. In fact, in September 2015 I had the great pleasure of going to the North Pole with David Hempleman-Adams, where I witnessed for myself the polar ice cap melting. Secondly, I attended COP 26 in Glasgow in November 2021 as the Scotland Office Minister, where I advocated enthusiastically for net zero 2050 and the leading role the UK played. I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Sharma, who is in his place today: when the UK took the presidency of COP 26 in 2019, 30% of the world had signed up to the concept of net zero, and when he handed over the role two years later, 90% had done so.
When I recently took on the Opposition Front-Bench role on energy, I had no particular ideology on energy. But, like any sensible business executive taking on a new role, I threw myself into the brief and went on a journey of discovery to learn from external stakeholders and experts what net zero really means for the UK. I shall share what I have found with your Lordships’ House.
Perhaps I should open with just two caveats. The first is from Dieter Helm, considered an expert in these matters and not particularly party aligned. He says that in the UK we have one of the most complicated energy systems in the world. The second caveat is that with the vast sums of money at stake here, there are vested interests which are very loud and very vocal. With those two caveats, let me give your Lordships an overview of what I found on net zero.
In 2004, the UK was energy independent: we could meet our internal demand with our own supply. In the last 20 years, both Governments have reduced their hydrocarbon production such that we now import 40% of our total energy needs, costing £40 billion a year. The result is that the UK now has the highest electricity prices in the OECD: ours are five times those in the US and seven times China’s for industrial usage, and three times the US’s for domestic usage. These exorbitant energy prices mean that the UK has deindustrialised, such that our economy and employment is today 80% services and 20% manufactured goods.
The concept of net zero was to set a target of 2050 whereby we would switch our energy dependence from 75% hydrocarbons to 25% hydrocarbons. Yet today, in 2025, we remain stubbornly dependent on hydrocarbons for 72% of our energy needs, with 40% imported. The reality is that our 20-year experiment with renewables, mostly windmills and solar, has failed because the add-on costs of subsidies, levies and grid upgrades have doubled household bills. Their intermittency means they can never provide reliable and consistent baseload and that we will always be dependent on gas as our reserve.
My Lords and Ladies, I am delighted to speak in this debate this afternoon and to follow the noble Lord, Lord Offord. This is only my second speech in this House, and I am pleased to make it on such a vital subject. I look forward to the maiden speech of my noble friend later.
The specific focus on affordability is welcome, but it gives me cause for concern. I thought it would imply, but it clearly states, the objective that we cannot now afford our commitment to net-zero emissions by 2050. Of course, the most fundamental response to that is: we cannot afford not to. I am tempted to speculate that the shift of policy that the noble Lord refers to perhaps reflects some internal political considerations on behalf of the Conservative Party, but I do not intend to get into that temptation and indulge in any political discussion, because this is too serious and too urgent. We must maintain our focus on the realities of climate change and the necessity of delivering on our commitment to net-zero targets.
None the less, I accept the value of questioning the viability and the detail of targets, because we must guarantee that they are realistic and deliverable. My experience in Scotland is a case in point. The Scottish Government have chased headlines with targets ahead of the UK, without taking the necessary actions, as has been clear to all. Now, their targets are deemed unrealistic, following a damning assessment by the Climate Change Committee, thus undermining the credibility of those targets. Setting targets that cannot be met proves counterproductive and breeds cynicism.
I stand here as a hard-headed Glaswegian who has learned to be sceptical of unworkable, even if worthy, targets. I have lived through industrial and energy transitions that have blighted communities and have blighted generations, and I am on alert for leaders who promise change but do not put in place the means or resources to deliver fair and positive results. But I say to noble Lords and Ladies this afternoon that that is not an excuse for inaction. Yes, question the target and examine the evidence, but avoiding action for reasons of political expediency is unforgivable and is an abject failure of leadership.
My Lords, I feel that I ought almost to congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Curran, on her second speech to the House. I also look forward very much to the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Rees.
I am almost embarrassed to admit that one of my first times as a Front-Bench spokesperson was during the consideration and passing of the Climate Change Bill in 2008, which came about largely because of the report The Economics of Climate Change, from the noble Lord, Lord Stern, which was of global significance. The great thing about that time was the unanimity and constructive nature not just of this House but of the other place as well. In this House, the Conservative Front Bench spokesperson was the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, and the never-to-be-forgotten and still very active the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, was Minister for Defra at that time, before DECC existed. There was unity on the idea that this was something that needed to be addressed.
We were the first globally to have such a comprehensive Act and set a net target of minus 60%, I think it was at that time, for emissions relative to 1990—later changed to 80% during the passage of the Bill. It went through with negligible opposition in both Houses, and since then that unity has continued to grow. As has been mentioned, the noble Baroness, Lady May, introduced and passed net zero for the Act in 2019. In a way, that was the high point of unity in this Parliament.
We then had Rishi Sunak as Prime Minister. To be honest, Mr Sunak was not really interested in this area at all. He took some persuasion to go to his first COP. He went in the end, but his heart was not there. After the by-election in Uxbridge, when Boris Johnson resigned, there was a feeling—mainly because of the ultra low emission zone argument going on—that this was the time to start to question net zero. Mr Sunak did three things; first, he delayed heat pumps; secondly, he delayed the ban on internal combustion engines; and thirdly, he took away some of the plans for energy efficiency on tenanted housing.
My Lords, the road to net zero is indeed the growth story of the 21st century. The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, rightly reminded us that that was the conclusion of Chris Skidmore’s report. I and many others have argued the same.
The clean is cheaper than the dirty across much of the economy. There is rapid innovation in the new technologies. Better energy efficiency is higher productivity. Cities where you can move and breathe more easily are more productive than those where you cannot. Air pollution kills around 35,000 people a year in the UK and maims and disables many more.
The strong and fruitful investment necessary to realise these gains will itself drive growth and productivity. Our economy desperately needs such investment and the increase in productivity it will bring. With good public policy, most of that investment will be in the private sector. There is no horserace between tackling climate change and generating growth. On the contrary, the former drives the latter.
Let us look at some specifics for the British consumer and dispose of the nonsense that the green transition drives up energy bills. I do not recognise the description given by the noble Lord, Lord Offord. For detail of a more serious analysis, I refer him to the outstanding work of the Energy Transitions Commission, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Turner, who is here today. All the numbers I use will be referenced from tomorrow on the website of the Grantham Research Institute at the LSE.
An average household today spends around £4,000 a year on energy bills and car running costs. Net-zero measures could save between a quarter and a third of this. Allowing for capital costs, a driver could save up to £400 a year by switching from petrol or diesel to an electric vehicle, an average household could save up to £550 a year through energy efficiency, and installing solar panels could save £300 or so a year. Further, there is substantial scope to cut electricity prices by reducing the overwhelming role of gas in pricing, by spreading transition costs over a longer period and shifting them on to gas, where they should be, and by making markets work better over space and time. The issues here concern affordable finance, facilitating the practicalities of change and lowering the price of electricity as lower-carbon and lower-cost options play an ever-increasing role. These will require clear and strong public policy, but staying with the dirty and costly makes no sense.
My Lords, this is a timely debate. I am very glad to be able to speak in it. I am reminded that the preacher in the Book of Ecclesiastes says:
“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven”,
including—I dare to mention in your Lordships’ House—a time to speak and a time to keep silence.
For the Church, increased costs have a material effect on what we can do, but I am as reluctant as anyone else to tilt at windmills or turbines. Not only the scientific consensus about human activity and climate but the dramatic changes of one’s lifetime—expanding deserts, retreating glaciers, rising sea temperature, extreme weather events—lead me to believe that this is a situation where the option is not “when”, or even “what”, but “how”. As with other great crises, we must shoulder the burden, and it is a challenge to our political leadership to share this task. In the Church of England, we have an exceptionally challenging target set by General Synod of achieving net zero by 2030. The national Church has ring-fenced £190 million to support its churches and clergy housing towards this goal.
In the diocese of Southwark where I serve, and the borough of Southwark, our share of national Church funding has seen 18 of our churches embarking on co-funded projects that will directly reduce our CO2 emissions. Further, 42 of our highest-emitting churches across the diocese have been offered a free energy audit and a starter grant from the Church of England to begin to take action to reduce emissions. We have, in addition, selected two churches—St Bartholomew’s in Horley and St Paul’s in Herne Hill—as demonstrator churches to provide an evidence base to demonstrate that rapid transition is possible.
That said, the need and the investment bring tangible benefits, as we have heard from other noble Lords. Churches and church schools around the country report significant savings in their energy bills as a result. In a wider context, the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit has reported that the UK’s net-zero sector grew by over 10% between 2023 and 2024, and generates—no pun intended—£83.1 billion in gross value added. The growth in employment in the sector is four times that of the economy as a whole. The lifetime cost of electricity generation for new solar panels, as of 2021, is 11% lower than the cheapest form of new fossil fuel generator, and onshore wind is 39% cheaper.
My Lords, I signed up to this debate out of a sense of duty, because as a Green—I point out to the noble Lord, Lord Stern, that Greens have been saying this for 50 years—I felt I had to put forward the interests of the planet and people, but now I have to follow four excellent speeches that I wish I had made myself. Nevertheless, I feel much less weary about this debate. A lot of us here, I think, know that the question is not about whether net zero will cost the UK money, because we all know that cheaper renewable energy and better insulation will pay us back over time. It is about who pays for the transformation to a green economy, who benefits from the switch away from fossil fuels and how much it will cost everyone if we do not do all we can to stop climate change getting worse.
The previous Government held back progress in a shameful way, and I am very concerned that this Government too are not as focused as they could be on the solutions that are more practical than the ones they propose. Climate chaos will hit our economy hard, whether we reach net zero or not. Global warming is already with us; the increase in the scale of wildfires and flash floods are just the first—quite mild—symptoms. We might focus on the increased energy of an individual hurricane season sucking up energy from the warming air, but it is the growing shift in temperature ranges and droughts that should really concern us. The changes to agricultural productivity around the globe will mean scarcity, inflation, famines and movements of people that could impact very seriously on other areas.
Some Governments will collapse. A country that rebuilds and bounces back from one major catastrophe will eventually collapse if that one-in-a-thousand climate event is repeated year after year. California is one of the most affluent places on earth, yet whole areas have been abandoned by private insurance, and people cannot afford either to rebuild after the wildfires or to move away because no one will buy their house. That is the new normal all over the world. Our economy is part of a global economy, and when parts of that international trade start to collapse, there will be far bigger impacts than Donald Trump’s tariffs.
My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to take part in this debate. I fully support my noble friend’s policy on trying to achieve net zero. We have heard many noble Lords speak about the need to do it—most noble Lords anyway. I would just like to say a few words about how to achieve it, because the issues relate to—as we have heard some noble Lords already mention—cost and reliability. Does the technology work or is it something in the dim, distant future? How is the energy distributed, what fuel does it replace, how it is produced? Of course, there is also security.
I will give two examples. The first is a pump storage scheme, which I worked on—it must be 50 years ago, I am so old now—on the River Severn. The great thing about pump storage—which has now come up again in people’s ideas—is that you can predict when it can produce energy, because you know when the tides are going to come in and out. It is quite simple. The key is to get a good place and planning and the right energy to make that work and produce low-cost energy at a reliable time.
I spoke about my second example briefly in the debates on the energy Bill. I have to declare an interest: I am one of 4 million people who live in a house in the country which does not have gas, and therefore we have to burn oil or use electric. There are a lot of—some 25,000—people working in this industry and it is quite a well-developed source of energy, which avoids you having to convert to air or ground source heating, which, as noble Lords will know, will probably cost between £15,000 and £30,000, and is actually quite beyond most people’s means. The main question is: where does the source of the fuel come from? The answer is it comes from second-hand cooking oil and things such as that.
It also needs distributing. It is worth looking at the way energy needs, assuming they are going to go down the wires in the future, will get distributed around many parts of the country which do not have it at the moment—we cannot see it at the moment.
My Lords, I am certainly not a climate denier. I believe that world emissions are continuing to rise quickly, despite all our efforts and all the warnings of the noble Lord, Lord Stern, and many others, and the difficulties of controlling the climate seem to be growing rather than decreasing. I am not even against having targets of a kind. Ambitions and targets are all right for Governments to have, as long as people are not misled into thinking that if they spend enough money it will all work when it does not. I am certainly not against John Keats and many of his associates as well; that is a lovely world we all aspire to. But I want it to work for a modern economy and a modern society of social stability rather than bitterness, division and real suffering by millions of people.
There are two gigantic question marks over the present path of our policy. I do not want to get into partisan points, but you can say the pathway was set in the past, but it seems it is being followed with zest at present. These worry me a lot. We are fooling ourselves if we ignore the real problems of these two gigantic questions.
The first is cost. The costs for net zero range widely. The official figure, from the Committee on Climate Change, is £1.4 trillion; it is £3 trillion, according to National Grid; figures of £6 trillion to £10 trillion are batted about as well—Net Zero Watch has those very high numbers; and the Energy Technologies Institute has said that the cost of decarbonising housing alone could be up to £2 trillion. So we are talking about the most enormous resources, and it is irresponsible not to ask in detail where on earth they are going to come from and who is going to pay. I am looking at the capital side—I have not come to consumers.
The Government do not have any money—they say that all the time. We all want a lot more. There are endless demands; there is a huge defence bill looming. The financing of this whole gigantic transition will have to be predominantly from private sources, private capital, working in new forms of co-operation with public capital. There is a whole area of thinking on this, which was addressed very interestingly in the New Statesman about two weeks ago, on how new forms of co-operation can be developed between government and the private sector—there is plenty of money in the private sector around the world, ready to invest in Britain—and how that can be done with entirely new thinking, getting away from the old, stale ideological debates about state and markets. I would love to hear a lot more of that coming out than we hear at present. Not much thinking seems to be going on in that area: too much old ideology, not enough new ideas. That is the first question.
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Meanwhile, renewable storage is impractical. Today in the UK, we have storage for only 30 minutes. Even accessing all the world’s combined storage today would give us only 12 hours. All the while, the upgrades to the grid required to distribute intermittent renewable energy from remote wind and solar farms has been costed by Aurora at £116 billion over the next 10 years. That amounts to £4,000 extra per household or £400 per annum, all of which means that the real cost of renewables is vastly higher than for gas, which can be distributed through our existing grid network, while also being unreliable. Finally, there has been no employment benefit to the UK because most of the capital equipment is manufactured offshore, mostly in China, and only 58% of our highly skilled hydrocarbon workforce is transitioning to renewables and at wages one-third lower, which explains why our highly skilled workforce is haemorrhaging abroad.
In answering numerous questions on this topic, the Minister insists that our energy prices are high because of international gas markets. This is a false narrative. The reality is that from 2008, household electricity prices began to diverge from wholesale prices of gas and electricity, which were broadly stable until 2021 and the Ukraine crisis, so why did household electricity prices accelerate away from wholesale prices faster in the UK than in the rest of Europe in the same period? Indeed, UK industrial electricity prices today are six times the price of wholesale gas, versus three times that in Germany and two-and-a-half times that in France.
Something other than the international wholesale price of gas must be driving higher electricity prices in the UK—and we now know the answer. It is all the subsidies, levies, curtailment payments and grid upgrades required by renewables, particularly offshore wind. Over the next five years, the total cost to households of renewable subsidies and levies is estimated by the OBR to be £95 billion. That is £3,400, or a staggering £680 per annum, per household.
I now turn to baseload. The simple reason why renewables will never be a reliable baseload in any energy system is their intermittency. Sadly, in the UK sometimes the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow. In the UK, gas is relied on as a reserve energy of last resort, or baseload, when the intermittency of renewables means that there is either no supply at peak demand or too much supply at reduced demand. This means that no matter how many wind farms we build, we can never switch off our gas reserve, which in turn results in massive duplication.
As a simple market mechanism, the market price will be determined by the marginal price of switching the gas reserve on and off, which has the grotesque outcome that windfarms are making huge profits based on the marginal gas price rather than on their own costs of production plus a margin. Instead of making our own homegrown gas production cleaner and more efficient, we have weighed it down with the associated cost of offshore wind, such that 50% of the fuel costs of gas power stations are in the form of carbon tax.
Moreover, our gas fleet dates from the 1990s and early 2000s, and is running at only 40% efficiency. Modern combined cycle gas turbines are the most carbon-efficient way to produce power through gas, with emissions at 45% of coal-fired power stations. At current prices, new CCGTs could produce electricity at £65 per megawatt hour, compared with new offshore wind at £90 to £120 per megawatt hour. Their capital cost is £500,000 per megawatt compared with offshore wind at £3 million per megawatt—one-sixth of the price. They also give 100% efficiency, versus 40% for wind. Meanwhile, nuclear remains the most emission-compliant baseload, which is why in France the cost of electricity is half that in the UK.
I turn now to energy security. The geopolitics of 2025 mean that energy is no longer just industrial policy; it is at the very heart of national defence. The UK now imports 70% of its gas, largely from Norway and the USA—thankfully, both friendly nations. Of peak UK gas, 20% comes through the Langeled pipeline between Norway and the UK. What havoc would be unleashed in the UK if that pipeline was ever sabotaged?
It begs the question of why we are shutting down domestic production of oil and gas—which supports an entire sector of 200,000 jobs, brings much-needed tax revenue to the Exchequer and contributes to our net-zero target—while importing gas from the same North Sea via Norway. Why should we put ourselves at the mercy of Chinese imports for offshore wind?
There is an opportunity to reset the geopolitics of Europe. German industry has also been hit by high energy prices, caused by divestment from nuclear and subsequent overreliance on Russian gas. If we want to deweaponise energy in Europe, surely Britain’s role as a clean and efficient homegrown oil and gas producer is crucial to our energy security.
I put it to noble Lords that it is time for a rethink and that 2025 is a good year to reassess net zero by 2050. COP 26, which I attended in Glasgow in November 2021, represented peak global enthusiasm for net zero. The UK led the way, with a commitment to switch from 75% to 25% hydrocarbon use. It is interesting to note that just two months ago, in February, out of the 195 countries party to the Paris climate agreement, only 10 submitted updated climate targets to the UN. Of these, only three G20 countries submitted an updated target, and only one country reaffirmed a 2050 target with a pathway—the UK.
How can it be credible to shut down our homegrown gas baseload, when we account for 1% of global emissions? China is opening one coal-fired power station per week and contributes 31% of global emissions. The fact is that the UK’s extortionate energy prices are damaging our economy, yet the gas both offshore and under our feet in the post-industrial heartlands of central Scotland, the north and the Midlands could generate an exciting new industrial revolution. As good citizens of the world, the UK can legitimately retain the ambition to have the cleanest energy system by 2050, but only if it produces cheaper energy which will increase the prosperity and security of our citizens.
Net zero 2050 is a laudable ambition that was passed through the House of Commons in 70 minutes in 2019, without any real assessment of its achievability. It has now become a straitjacket that is preventing the UK from resuming our place in this modern world as an industrial, technological and military powerhouse. In 2025, it is now clear to see that it is neither practical nor affordable, and it behoves all of us to think again. That is why I am proud that my party and my leader, Kemi Badenoch, has had the courage to grasp this thorny nettle. She made it clear in her keynote speech two weeks ago that net zero 2050 is unachievable. This requires our party in opposition to do some serious work to set out an alternative plan for the citizens and businesses of the UK—a plan that, at its heart, is affordable.
In considering the evidence that I argue we should examine this afternoon, let me refer to the words of a Minister in the other place:
“Our latest estimates put the costs of net zero at under 2% of GDP—broadly similar to when we legislated for it … with scope for costs of low-carbon technologies to fall faster than expected”.—[Official Report, Commons, 7/9/21; col. 139.]
That was in 2021, and the Minister making that statement was none other than Kemi Badenoch. Her current repositioning has raised alarm across the political spectrum, not least from our former Prime Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady May, who stated that the target
“is supported by the scientific community and backed by the independent Climate Change Committee as being not just necessary but feasible and cost-effective”.
Moreover, no one should be permitted to make claims about the costs of achieving the net-zero target without factoring in the costs of doing nothing. As the OBR has recently stated,
“unmitigated climate change would ultimately have catastrophic economic and fiscal consequences for the UK”,
and that reality must be faced too. That is why clean energy is properly a central mission of this Government and helps us to maintain our commitment to net zero.
The CBI has said:
“Now is not the time to step back from the opportunities”
of green jobs, warm homes and energy security. It also found that the net zero economy is growing three times faster than the overall UK economy. As has been referenced, we must of course consider the future of the North Sea in all of this—and it is the clean energy mission that offers a hope for the future for the North Sea, with its incredible clean-energy potential.
We know that the North Sea is a maturing basin. Oil and gas production has seen a natural decline of 72% from 1999 to 2023. The industry has lost around one-third of its workforce over the past decade. Oil and gas will, of course, continue to play an important role for decades to come, but we must seize the opportunities of the clean energy transition, harnessing the North Sea’s unique strengths—offshore infrastructure, highly skilled engineers and deep supply chains, boosted enormously of course by the establishment of Great British Energy in Aberdeen.
As I say, I am that hard-headed Glaswegian, and I am clear that as Glaswegians we like to think that we see it as we find it and tell it as it is—and so we must. Of course, as the noble Lord said, we must face the stark realities, as he put it. The stark reality that we must face is climate change and what it will do to us; it is here and it will impact on all our lives. So let us galvanise around the clean energy mission and deliver the targets, because that is the future that our people need.
However, to give Mr Sunak his due, he unsuspectingly asked his former Energy Minister, Chris Skidmore, to produce a report on net zero independently. For the benefit of the Conservative Front Bench in particular, Chris Skidmore was no bleeding-heart liberal. He came up with these conclusions as part of his report, under the heading
“Net zero is the growth opportunity of the 21st century”:
first,
“The UK must act decisively to seize the economic opportunities”;
secondly,
“The benefits of investing in net zero today outweigh the costs”;
thirdly,
“Net zero can materially improve people’s lives—now and in 2050”;
and, lastly,
“Net zero by 2050 remains the right target for the UK: it is backed by the science”.
That was a former Conservative Front-Bencher—not anybody who would ever be a Liberal Democrat—yet those were his conclusions.
Mr Sunak paid little attention to that and stayed on his retreat. What was the result? He lost 251 seats in the House of Commons last year. I suspect that his move towards Reform was not particularly successful, and that that will continue to be the case.
We now have the leader of the Opposition, first, declaring herself a “net-zero sceptic” and, secondly and more recently, saying that net zero is “impossible” without “bankrupting” the nation. The consequences if we do nothing are, as the noble Baroness just said, far greater. To give two macro examples, the CBI reported a 10% growth in the green economy in 2024 whereas the rest of the economy stayed pretty well as it was. On the micro side, the Government expect the warm homes plan to save individual households £140 per household. That would be far more if we had a proper future homes standard.
The UN climate chief, Simon Stiell, said that climate breakdown
“is a recipe for permanent recession”.
If we follow the Conservative Party down the route it is taking then that is where we are heading. I suggest to the noble Lord, Lord Offord, that he reads his colleague Chris Skidmore’s report to really get how this works.
Let us look at the job opportunities. Currently, the UK’s low-carbon economy generates more than £80 billion in gross value added per year—close to 3% of GDP. It is projected to grow at 10% year on year, as the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, reminded us, and will likely overtake the important creative and financial services sectors within the next 10 to 15 years. It is a big deal. It already generates around a million jobs, with hotspots in Scotland, Hartlepool, Nottingham, and Redcar and Cleveland. Low-cost, low-carbon energy will be crucial to our future in AI and our competitiveness more generally.
Let us look at energy security and resilience. The UK’s dependence on fossil fuels involves great risk. The 2022 invasion of Ukraine triggered a dramatic spike in natural gas prices, household energy bills more than doubled and many were pushed into poverty. It cost the UK Exchequer around £56 billion in emergency support—close to 2% of GDP. A UK fuelled by wind, solar, hydro and nuclear will have cheaper energy and be much more economically and energy secure.
Let us remember why we must go for net zero. On current policies, the world is heading towards global average temperature increases of 2.5 or 3 degrees centigrade. We are fast approaching 1.5 degrees centigrade and the possibility of tipping points which could make climate change unmanageable. Continuing in this way would likely make many large, heavily populated parts of the world uninhabitable through inundation, intolerable heat, desertification, extreme weather events and disease. We have to keep the science right at the forefront. Hundreds of millions, probably billions, would have to move or perish. We would destroy much of the biodiversity and natural capital on which we depend. The effects would be devastating. Delay is deeply dangerous.
Let us also remember that the UK matters. Although we contribute less than 1% of global emissions, we are rightly seen as a leader. Indeed, we were the first G7 country to commit to net zero by 2050 under Prime Minister Theresa May in 2019. COP 26 in Glasgow—I have been to all the COPs since 2006—in December 2021, under a Conservative Government and led splendidly by the noble Lord, Lord Sharma, who is here today, was a landmark. The Liberal Democrats have long championed the issue and I wrote the Stern review for the UK Treasury 20 years ago as a civil servant under a Labour Government. If we fracture or fail, other countries may back off. Let us not lose the cross-party commitment which is critical for investor confidence and the sustainable prosperity we seek.
The world cannot afford the risks that delay would bring. That is the opposite of realism. The UK cannot afford to pass up the tremendous opportunities that lie in the new growth story of the 21st century.
To continue along this path will mitigate the otherwise fearful future ahead of us. The Office for Budget Responsibility last year calculated that severe weather could cost the UK economy 8% in GDP by 2050. The impact on poorer regions of the world, some of whose Anglican dioceses are linked to my own, will be dramatically greater and will cause a consequent upheaval and movement of populations. That will have major impacts on countries such as ours.
Yet if we pursue net zero by 2050 with the spirit, ingenuity and imagination at our command, and cherish the creation given us, we may yet begin to restore some of the damage our species has done. John Keats wrote:
“O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing”.
Little did he realise that his poetry heralded the perils we face if we abandon our vigilance. The challenges of net zero are hard, but they are not unaffordable. The price of hesitation, though, will be irreversible. The time is now.
If we want to know where all the objections to net zero have come from, we have to follow the money. The Conservative Party leader has abandoned net zero by 2050 because she is in the pay of the climate deniers in Tufton Street. She made the announcement immediately after receiving donations from the Global Warming Policy Foundation and the linked pressure group Net Zero Watch. At least four members of Kemi Badenoch’s shadow Cabinet—including her shadow Net Zero Secretary, Claire Coutinho—have also received donations from funders of the group. It was the same under the previous Government, with the fossil fuel lobby writing this country’s laws. The right-wing think tank Policy Exchange got money from American oil giant ExxonMobil. Policy Exchange then advised Prime Minister Sunak on drawing up new laws to clamp down on protesters such as Just Stop Oil. That is two-tier democracy: the people with the big money get access to the Prime Minister to create draconian laws aimed at silencing the people with not very much money.
That is how modern Parliament works. It is systematically corrupt and biased in favour of those with fat wallets. It starts with the fossil fuel industry making money out of killing the planet and ends with Ministers colluding with that destruction by dishing out new licences and tax breaks for North Sea oil and gas. Those who object, even if they do so peacefully and non-violently, are arrested and convicted for just planning a protest—as we saw at the Quaker meeting house just last week.
I am sure that Labour Peers still see themselves as good people—despite all the cuts and the thousands of children thrown into poverty—but the Government are happy for the police to use the draconian law that the previous Government introduced. Labour spoke against it but sat on its hands and let it pass, and now it is not rescinding or repealing it. This Government obviously have some responsibility for the arrests and police behaviour last week. If they think the police did something they should not have done, and if they do not think the police were right, they really ought to start thinking about repealing those draconian powers.
The Green Party wants an end to government by cheque book. We would get rid of all the vested interests that promote the expansion of Heathrow and Luton and the growing number of private jets. We would stop money being wasted on expensive climate cons such as the Drax power station, new nuclear, and carbon capture and storage. The noble Lord, Lord Offord, mentioned something about this; it was so irritating that I had to write it down. He said that “renewable storage is impractical”. Well, so is carbon capture and storage. He should get some more information about that; it is absolutely failing.
We should put solar panels on schools and new homes—all of them, not just token changes for the sake of a photo opportunity. The Green Party would make sure that all new homes become energy producers and that communities, rather than corporations, benefit from the renewable power in their part of the country. This is the way to get people on side with a green new deal—not changing the planning rules, threatening newts and sending in the bulldozers.
My noble friend spoke about what is happening in Scotland, and I am told that the cost of increasing the amount of power needed to change the infrastructure in Scotland is somewhere between £900 and £1,300 per home. That is a lot of homes in Scotland. We have to look at the cheapest and easiest way of achieving this without having to change your boiler or having to keep the electric switched on.
This is why the Governments of Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland have all committed to using these new fuels as a key part of their decarbonisation strategies. I rather worry that some members of our Government seem to be more keen to build a third runway at Heathrow and use second-hand cooking oil to fuel all the planes that may need it. I hope that is not serious, because there is a greater need of this material for other things, besides enabling you to get to Guatemala rather more quickly.
I have two requests for my noble friend the Minister. First, will he acknowledge the needs of the rural, off-grid households within the forthcoming warm homes plan? If not, the Government will not have fully recognised the issues that these households are facing, and it is a serious issue for people who cannot afford it. I imagine that it applies to churches as well, because we do not want to be shivering either in churches or at home.
Secondly, we have the primary legislation in place via the Energy Act 2023 to create the necessary obligation mechanism, which would give the necessary market signals and certainty to the industry to roll out these fuels for home heating and reduce cost to the consumer. It does not need a public subsidy, grants or even Treasury money. All we need, I am told, is the Secretary of State to activate Section 159(3) of that Act and launch a public consultation to gather the views of the stakeholders involved. Will my noble friend commit to that when he responds to the debate?
In the meantime, I congratulate all noble Lords who have spoken in favour of net zero, and let us hope we keep at it.
The second question is: where is the clean electricity coming from to replace the whole negativism, the whole abolition of oil and gas, that is hoped for and will of course take many years—perhaps until 2030, 2035 or even 2050? That has to happen if we are serious about a form of net zero and decarbonisation. People are very reluctant to give an answer.
The official line is that we are going to need about 200 gigawatts in all, against our present figure of 65 or 70, of which half, on average throughout the year, comes from renewables at present. Of course, it will be much more in the future. The snag is that for 3,000 hours throughout the year, which is about one-third of the year, there is no wind around the entire British Isles. There is a major intermittency problem, and it has to be addressed. An intermittency fulfilment by generating enough electricity at the rate which I think is coming—about 300 gigawatts or 350 gigawatts—is very expensive, for the simple reason that it cannot be used to earn profits all the time. It sits there idle, and someone has to pay.
We know what the answer is. We know that we must let our much-diminished nuclear system, which was run right down, be restored. There are some huge decisions to be taken: some for SMRs, which are the small, new technologies, and others—I look on this with great reluctance—for still plodding along with the old white elephant giant technologies. Those are full of risk, with investors reluctant to go near them and demanding enormous government input of resources, and, of course, charges on consumers.
There is a proposition I find incredible, following Hinkley, and which is in deep trouble. The chairman of the managing body, EDF, has just been sacked by the French Government and it has been advised not to invest further in foreign areas and to concentrate on cheap electricity for the French. The proposition is to replicate this very bad example at Sizewell. It seems absolute madness and the wrong direction. We should be going for SMRs; the order books are filling up. Other nations are ordering SMRs on every side, and we will be late in the queue. We should get on with it now.
That is the necessity and, unless we face it, we can order new combined cycle gas stations—indeed, we are doing so, because we can see that the so-called decarbonisation by 2030 is going to involve more gas, not less—but the carbon from them will have to be captured by new schemes, of which one, I think, has been commissioned. In fact, we need about 10 or 15 of them, but we have not started on that. The hope of getting there by 2030, however much we spend, is very remote and thin indeed. It is a delusion, and a very dangerous one, which the public will turn on angrily when they realise they have been misled.
It is possible to get a cleaner, better society and an energy transition. In the past, it has happened through markets; this time we are trying to make it happen through the activities of government itself, which is much more difficult, but possible. Whatever we call it, honesty and reality will have to be faced on an unprecedented scale, and that should be a matter for extreme concern in the minds of the governing party.