Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, I wish to speak to Amendment No. 17D as an amendment to Amendment No. 17A. It says here that I have spoken to this with Amendment No. 9, but I am not sure about that. Clearly, this is a core area of belief and it is what the Bill is about. Should there be domestic targets or should this be written in the context of the wider world? Before this debate, I would not have thought that the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, would be my major witness on how the targets for the Bill could be avoided. The minor ways are the banking and borrowing provisions which allow carbon output and accounting to be pushed from one period to another—all those fudge factors are in there at the moment—and the major one is offshoring. I am sure that, in the summer, the Minister saw a Defra and Stockholm Environment Institute report called Development of an Embedded Carbon Emissions Indicator. It is an excellent document. It asks what the carbon content of our exports and imports is. Effectively, it is asking what the carbon consumption of the United Kingdom is over time, as opposed to our carbon production. Of course, carbon consumption in many ways is a better economic indicator of carbon than production—what the UK consumes rather than just produces and perhaps exports. That report highlighted the fact that currently we consume something like 37 per cent more carbon than we produce and that gap is getting broader. Why? It has everything to do with the global economics of trade, in that many of our carbon-intensive industries are going to the developing world, while we concentrate on and expand our economy in terms of services and low-carbon technologies. That is not good news. It says that as a country we are responsible for far more carbon emissions than we report, but we are able to offshore them. Ironically, we tut-tut at China for its increasing emissions, but a large proportion of those emissions are ones which we have exported. I have tried to get to the bottom of this and to put in more normal language what we mean by trying to look at the domestic production of carbon in this Bill rather than the broader carbon budget. One could illustrate that by saying that perhaps, later this evening, I will invite the Minister to the pub next door and in there we will see two fat guys discussing how to lose weight. We might listen in to their conversation and they might challenge each other to lose weight. They might say, ““We are both overweight, which is bad for us and it is not government policy either, so let's commit to losing five stone each within a year with the prize of a bottle of champagne””. Having listened to that, we think we will go back, in a year’s time, to see whether the task has been achieved. In a year’s time, we go to the pub again and one of the guys is substantially thinner but the other one is exactly the same. The thin one says, ““I have achieved my target; I have lost five stone so I can have my bottle of champagne””, but the other guy says, ““I have won as well and I claim my bottle of champagne because I have lost five stone””. The thin guy will say, ““I am sorry; you look exactly the same weight as before””, to which the fat guy will say, ““No, it is quite all right, I paid my brother to lose five stone and I have a certificate from his doctor to tell you that he lost five stone, so I win a prize as well””. The Minister would say that that is absolutely all right because in terms of the nation's health, one person losing five stone is as good as anyone else losing five stone, but everyone in the pub will know that that individual is a fraud and I believe he would be treated with derision for having delegated his healthcare. That is exactly the same as how we look at the UK economy in regard to carbon. It is no good saying that we will delegate this task. Not only have we delegated our carbon-intensive production to the developing world, but we will be even cleverer than that now and will let the developing world do the carbon reductions for us; we will claim them and we will feel good while it has to do the heavy lifting. Somehow that is not right; there is a strange logic there. That is why we on these Benches are still unhappy that there is no commitment in the Bill to domestic carbon reduction in the economy. I accept that the methodology used to move forward and the Conservative amendments are much better than the Bill was when it left the Commons, but there is an important issue about leadership here. Whatever we say as a nation, whatever the Government say and whatever is said about leadership, the gaping hole on the face of the Bill regarding finding someone else to do our cleaning up potentially wrecks that leadership and that moral authority. I tabled an amendment which suggests that we move from 70:30, as the ratio was, to 50:50. I will not move that amendment because 50:50 is still derisory. I am glad, however, that the Government have understood that there is a big issue here and it is one that they have tackled to a degree. I have faith in the climate change committee and I hope it will come forward with good logic and tight targets. This is one area of the Bill, however, where I believe the Government have a major problem in their authority and global leadership.