Climate Change and SustainableEnergy Bill

I will, of course, bring that to the attention of the leader of the council. I am very pleased to be able to offer him the opportunity of visiting my hon. Friend’s constituency and I am sure that he will consider that. I had a public meeting with local residents in my constituency recently. We had a range of speakers talking about the issue of climate change. I was pleased that residents had taken the initiative to set up such a meeting because it is through such meetings that we can try to highlight the issues in our communities and explore what people can practically do today to address them. One of the speakers at the meeting raised a point that I want to share with the House. He raised the issue of whether we are all in denial about climate change—in other words, we talk about it, we debate it, we try to put measures in place to address increasing CO2 emissions, but we do not truly believe that there is an issue. Perhaps we can all think individually about whether we truly believe that climate change is an issue. As Members of Parliament and representatives of our communities, we have to be leaders on this issue and take the message back to our communities that climate change is not a figment of the media’s imagination or the climatologists’ imagination. It is a real issue that will affect not just people living in other countries, but us, our children and our future generations. As I said, I was pleased that the residents of Basingstoke felt strongly enough about the matter to have a public meeting where the issues were debated in full. The Bill is another signal to communities such as mine that the House is not in denial, that it takes the issue very seriously and will do all that it can to try to promote a change in consumer habits on this matter. I find it unacceptable that UK CO2 emissions have risen, not fallen, since 1997. We should not accept that; we should fight against it. The Bill increases all of our accountability on this matter. It drives the issue of climate change not just upwards into international Government and national Government, but down into our communities. At the end of the day, it is down to all of us to address this issue if we are really to see change.