Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, I have no desire to delay the House and I know better than most how the credit roll at the end of a movie can be exasperating, so I shall keep my contribution as short as possible. I want to say on behalf of the members of the Joint Committee how involved and engaged we were in the process, and we are hugely appreciative of the Minister for the way in which he has treated our recommendations. Interestingly, around 70 per cent of our recommendations have been accepted and incorporated in the Bill that will now go to the other end of the corridor. That is not a bad day’s work. I think we would all agree that the Climate Change Bill cannot succeed in a purely party political environment. We are in this together and we will succeed or fail together. As the Bill passes to the other place, and in every sense I wish it godspeed, I want to point out to the Government that the atmosphere out there in the world at large regarding these matters has changed in the 10 months since we started our consideration of the Bill. Just recently, articles by John Vidal, Andrew Rawnsley, Martin Kettle and Ian Sample have all essentially made the same point—that there is a developing informed scepticism about the commitment of this House and the Government in general to the intentions that lie behind the Bill. Like many noble Lords, I thoroughly enjoyed President Sarkozy’s extravagant flattery last week, but there is another voice out there. Some of your Lordships may have read an article recently published in the Guardian by the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, Professor Kishore Mahbubani. I am grateful to him for allowing me to précis his words: "““While the West conducts a self-congratulatory conversation, the rest of the world sees an emperor with no moral clothing””." Professor Mahbubani describes three crucial flaws in the following terms: "““The first is its [the West’s] inability to practise what it preaches. The second flaw is its refusal to recognise its track record of double standards … whenever a western country has to choose between promoting its values or defending its interests, interests always trump values. The third flaw in western discourse is that when presented with a choice between ‘doing good’ and ‘feeling good’, the West almost always chooses the latter—because it costs less””." The Bill is a fantastic opportunity for this country to prove that it will not remain guilty of those flaws, and in that sense I commend it and wish it well.