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

My Lords, the Government are introducing legislation now that is due to have effect in 2050. I just ask noble Lords to put their minds back to 1910 or 1911—the year of Lloyd George’s Budget. Would it have been possible to have foreseen in any way whatever what was going to happen around the time of the death of George VI? It strikes me as very dangerous to legislate or even to attempt to have any idea of what will happen in 40 or 50 years’ time. It is impossible to know what will happen the day after tomorrow, let alone in 50 years’ time. I completely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lea, that it is a great pity that the noble Lord, Lord Stern, does not come here more often to defend his views on occasions such as this. My noble friend Lord Dixon-Smith made a very good point about the security of oil and other energy supplies, but that is a distraction from the debate on global warming. The talk of global warming is preventing us from thinking logically about the replacement of oil supplies, because perfectly reasonably, with the decline in the North Sea supply, we are not inclined to trust either Arab sheikhs or Russian oligarchs, who are the main source of supply. Just recently, there was an announcement that 90 square miles or kilometres—I am sorry; I cannot quite remember which, but it is quite a large area—of the Thames estuary will be covered in wind farms. I am sure that that is absolutely excellent. The announcement said that those will provide the fuel for 500,000 houses, but it did not say that that is only under perfect wind-blowing conditions. I do not know whether your Lordships are aware of this, but we had a very cold snap this February. The wind stopped because there was a great blodge of immovable high pressure over the United Kingdom, so all those windmills just stood there not moving at all and producing no energy. What an immensely useful investment that is; you invest in 90 square miles or kilometres of windmills to produce no energy when it is very cold. There was an intervention from the Liberal Front Bench about how sea levels were rising by 1.5 metres per whatever it is. The noble Lord is obviously unaware that Flinders University did a test on Tuvalu and found that there was absolutely no movement in sea levels whatever. The instruments that were used were the most modern and sensitive that there have been. I used to think that it was completely logical to believe that, if we chucked buckets of gunge up into the sky, that would have some effect. I thought that people were right about this and that it made sense. Then I read the book written by my noble friend Lord Lawson—I hope that I am not giving it too much of a boost, but there it is—and found the intellectual argument behind it extremely interesting. It has converted me from thinking that one should not do all this damage to asking what harm is being done. We know that CO2 levels have gone up between 1997 and 2007. However, temperatures have not. We know that the other day a test was done on the depth of the Antarctic ice cap and it was found to be rather thicker than everybody thought. We know that in the 1860s one of the Norwegian explorers, Nansen or Amundsen, tried to get through the North-West Passage and found clear water further north in the summer than it was last year. We know that there has been extremely heavy snow in the Himalayas, the Alps and all the big mountain ranges this year and we know that the Arctic ice cap is actually larger this May than it should be. Those are facts. These are not things invented by people; these are documented facts. So have they got it right? I have become, because of the books of my noble friend Lord Lawson and several others, a serious doubter, not because I have any emotional attraction to an idea but because I am presented with a series of facts that make me now think slightly differently. The concept of budgeting to spend £400 billion—at that number, one begins to lose all sense of reality—by 2050 because of facts that look to me jolly dodgy does not seem a very sensible thing to do. I know that the Minister will say that it is received scientific knowledge that global warming is happening, but my noble friend has shown that it is not. We ought to be very careful before we go on a spending spree of this magnitude because of something that might happen in the equivalent of the difference between the Parliament Act 1911 and the coronation of our present sovereign.