Climate Change Act 2008 (2020 Target, Credit Limit and Definitions) Order 2009

My Lords, I am grateful to the Government for ensuring that these statutory instruments, of which the first is particularly important, can be debated at a convenient hour. I shall not comment on the assertions made by the Minister before he got on to the instruments except to observe that they are wholly unfounded. I suspect that many noble Lords have not yet read the Government’s impact assessment for the Act that we are discussing, which was slipped out without notifying Parliament, and then not until the Bill had already received Royal Assent. It is a grubby business that rather defeats the purpose of impact assessments, which are intended to enable Parliament to judge before passing legislation whether it is likely to be cost-effective. In this case, the impact assessment states that the costs to the United Kingdom of the policy commitments in this Act are likely to be of the order of £400 billion—a massive sum—which, it notes, ""does not include the full range of costs"." In passing, it is worth noting that most energy economists, such as Professor Helm of Oxford, regard the methodology used to arrive at even this figure, large as it is, to be seriously flawed and absurdly overoptimistic. Be that as it may, those are the costs that the Government assess. So what are the benefits? These are anyone’s guess, but two things are clear. First, any measurable benefit that may accrue as a result of reduced warming would not help the United Kingdom, at least for the next 100 years, since scientists are agreed that northern Europe would actually benefit from a warmer climate over that period. Secondly, and rather more importantly, there can be no discernible benefit to anyone unless the rest of the world follows the United Kingdom’s quixotic lead, which, to say the least, is highly unlikely. As the Government’s impact assessment puts it, with studied understatement, ""The economic case for the UK continuing to act alone where global action cannot be achieved would be weak"." How conditional is the commitment contained in the 2020 order that we are considering today and, indeed, in the Act of which it is a part? The Minister said something about these targets being contingent on a global deal, but there is nothing at all in the Act or the order to say that anything in them is contingent on a global deal. These are just words from the Minister; they do not affect the legally binding nature of the Act, which is unconditional. What precisely does he mean by, ""contingent upon a global deal"?" If there is no global deal, will the Act be repealed? What kind of global deal? Is it any old kind of global deal or just one that says that there will be technology transfer and nothing else? What nature of global deal is required in order for this to be acceptable to the Government? Given that the European Union has made its 2020 target conditional on the outcome of the global Copenhagen conference this December—that was the explicit conclusion of the December European summit on the subject—and will review it next year in the light of that, and given that the Obama Administration in the United States have made it clear that their own post-Kyoto commitment will depend on an adequate contribution from other major emitters, notably China, is the United Kingdom alone in making a massively expensive commitment wholly unconditional? Again I ask: is this genuinely legally contingent on a global deal and, if so, on what kind of global deal is it contingent? This is important because these targets are legally binding—that is, they are justiciable and the Government are subject to judicial review on this whole issue. While we are on the subject of international conditionality, the Minister will be aware that the DfID-commissioned report An Institutional Architecture for Climate Change, proposes, inter alia, a new international institution with coercive powers to force countries to cut their carbon emissions and suggests that countries that do not accept this should be, ""effectively barred from all forms of international co-operation". " It is bad enough that responsibilities for climate change used to be divided between the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Department of Energy and Climate Change, but now DfID, too, is getting in on the act. So much for joined-up government. Do the Government accept the draconian recommendations of the report that DfID has commissioned? Will the target that we are discussing today be contingent on some such so-called new architecture being put in place? Nor is this the only form of conditionality at issue. In his Statement last month on carbon capture and storage, the Secretary of State, Mr Miliband, said in another place: ""With a solution to the problem of coal, we greatly increase our chances of stopping dangerous climate change. Without it, we will not succeed".—[Official Report, Commons, 23/4/09; col. 382.]" He therefore announced a requirement for new coal-fired power stations, which are needed to prevent the lights from going out, to be retrofitted with CCS by 2025—incidentally, well after the date of the order before us. The date was set as late as that because the technology needed does not at present exist, but the Government hope that by then it will. Perhaps it will, perhaps not—but, even if it does, at what cost? At any cost? Is there any cost conditionality at all? Most experts believe that even if the technology does become available, it will be prohibitively expensive, for compelling reasons that I do not have time to go into here. To be fair, the Government suggest conditionality in the department’s press release accompanying the Minister’s Statement to Parliament, which states that the goal is: ""Full scale retrofit of CCS within five years of the technology being independently judged as technically and commercially proven"." What precisely—and I mean "precisely"—does "commercially proven" mean? In conclusion, I suggest to the House and to the Minister that it would be the height of irresponsibility for the United Kingdom, and the United Kingdom alone, to be required to incur the massive costs arising from the order that we are debating today, wholly unconditionally, irrespective of whether CCS, which the Government concede is absolutely essential, becomes either technologically possible or affordable, and irrespective of whether the rest of the world commits to following suit, without which even the conjectural benefits of this hugely expensive policy cannot possibly accrue.