My Lords, I think it is valuable that my noble friends Lord Jenkin and Lord Roper have put this amendment forward. Although I do not support its content, it is an important subject to have raised
briefly in this Committee. One difficulty that we have to face is that the way that renewable materials are considered alters very quickly. There was a time when people talked about biomass as though it was the solution to everything. They hardly ever spoke about biomass without saying how wonderful it was. Then we saw the pendulum swing to the other end and no sort of biomass was acceptable to anyone. There was always some good reason why it was not acceptable. In rather a long life, I have usually found that neither of those two positions is a good place for the pendulum, although somewhere in the middle is.
However, there is a central issue which goes beyond biomass. It is illustrated by a circumstance in my own county of Suffolk, where the local council has just turned down a request to build a waste-to-energy installation using straw. The argument against it was not an environmental one. It was a genuine argument about whether it and other straw-burning waste-to-energy installations would have such an appetite for straw locally that the price for straw would increase because of the subsidy structure. The other uses of straw in the area, which were very significant and led to opposition to the installation from pig farmers and others, meant that the planning committee had to say that it did not see that this was the right answer. I am not at all sure that that was the planning reason that it gave, because planning is a rather complex matter, but that was certainly what the argument was about.
I hope that this Committee, the Standing Committee and our future discussions in your Lordships’ House can lead the charge for having sensible discussions about environmental matters and not arguments between those who believe in things and those who do not. Very often, the decision and the choice come somewhere between the two, and this issue illustrates that very well. It is perfectly possible to be an enthusiastic environmentalist determined to combat climate change but to say that a particular straw-burning installation in a particular place is not the answer. The same applies to biomass. However, that does not mean that you are taking a nimby attitude. I am not talking about people objecting to something because it is near to them; I am talking about having more serious discussions about individual issues than is often allowed simply because the two sides clash and the space in between is not available for intelligent debate.
On this matter, it is important that two things are taken into account. First, how does the subsidy—that is what it is—affect other industries; and are there circumstances in which we should look at that carefully? Secondly, how do we make sure that the subsidy is in support of biomass which is properly sourced? I do not want this particular solution although there is a bit that appeals to me: we should make sure that people do not use biomass that has a bigger carbon footprint than what it is replacing.
As chairman of the Committee on Climate Change, I recently received a delegation from America, which is exporting a lot of pellets into this country. I found the discussion rather embarrassing because, when I said to the people concerned, “Tell me, is this certified?”, they said, “Yes”. I asked, “By whom?”, and they
replied “By us”. I said that I thought that certification ought to be a little more arm’s length than that. They claimed that all this stuff came from certified forests but I think that there is now some pretty good international measurement that enables one to decide whether “certified” means “certified” or whether it means, “This is a label that we like putting on it because, if we don’t, nobody will buy it”, which seemed to me closer to what they were actually saying.
It is important that we should raise this issue, both for the specifics of the amendment and to say to my noble friend that this is an area—I know that she understands this—where we are all concerned not to restrict biomass in such a way as to lose the real advantages, but not to extend it so that it becomes a front for a worse attitude towards the environment than that represented by the fuels it replaces.
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