Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, I, too, wish to speak on the subject. This evening marks the final phase of a legislative journey that for me started 18 months ago when I was asked to chair the joint parliamentary committee scrutinising this Bill. In another sense, it also represents the starting point in the far longer and more difficult slog of implementing the Bill’s best intentions. This Bill will only be the first piece in the legislative puzzle that is likely to be required if we are to achieve our aim of a sustainable society and a sustainable planet. I have little doubt that by 2020 this House will be debating the pros and cons of what for the present I will describe as personal carbon allowances. After a great deal of argument, the House will pass some tentative legislation to this effect. I hope that it will not be so tentative that it will fail to achieve the result that by then will be badly needed. If today I am able to give this Bill eight and a half out of 10, it is more to do with the ambitions it sets for itself than the rather limited means it has chosen to achieve them. On more than one occasion, I have warned of the possibility of this Bill morphing into a carbon trading Act. I am sorry to say that, despite the best possible intentions, this is largely what has happened. Although a great deal could be said on this subject, I will restrict myself to addressing the broad thrust of this group of amendments. Why do I remain intransigent on the subject of a cap on the purchase of overseas carbon credits in compensation for domestic emissions? There are two principal reasons. First, I reject the simplistic economics that insist that a unit of carbon saved is the same wherever in the world that saving comes from. On a purely like-for-like basis, that may be true but the situation is far more complicated and rather more interesting than that. A unit of carbon purchased from a developing country has a tangible benefit both in its own terms and as a means of transferring capital from what for convenience I will call the rich north to the impoverished south. It is, however, solely a one-for-one transaction, having little or no afterlife or long-term value. A domestic carbon saving, on the other hand, can well be a precursor, as we have seen with recycling, to permanent behaviour change, leading to the saving of many carbon units. So, instead of one for one, or like for like, it becomes one for many. This should not be allowed to become a zero-sum game. I was interested to hear the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, because in one respect, and only one respect, he is absolutely right. The notion of this Bill as a carbon trading Act is a real danger. The same fertile imaginations that brought us our present credit crunch are without doubt sharpening their swords to take a slice of the secondary trade in carbon emissions. It will only be a matter of time before one of our national newspapers blazons a headline, ““Carbon trade scam revealed””. I urge the Government to look carefully at what they are setting in train. The conditions exist for something frightening to occur. The noble Earl, Lord Onslow, who is not in his place, said he believes people will look back on this Act—as it will be then—and think we were a bunch of ““arses””; I think that was his word. I have made a promise to myself that I intend to bind all contributions to this Bill in a leather book, give it to my great-grandchildren and ask them to read it, say every five years, and decide for themselves who were the greater arses during the passage of this Bill. The second reason for my intransigence is well rehearsed. The Kyoto Protocol, of which we were an early signatory, is absolutely clear that purchased carbon credits will be supplemental to domestic savings. No amount of ministerial tautology—