My Lords, I hesitate to intervene at a late stage in this debate. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, for tabling the amendment that we are discussing because it has enabled this
extremely wide-ranging debate over a whole lot of matters that are not specifically aimed at the wording of the amendment. I am bound to express the view, which the House might agree with, that having had this debate at the start of Report I hope we will not have to repeat it.
The debate reminds me so much of the distinction between climate and weather. This morning, I tried to set out to come here. Every road I attempted to pass down was blocked by a fallen tree for about the first three hours of the day, and it was impossible. Of course I am here—that is noble Lords’ misfortune but that cannot be helped. The fact of the matter is that that is weather, and weather is only a part of the climate. This debate makes me think more and more of weather. However, the conclusions we come to and set in our debate will create the Bill and will set the climate. That is the significance of what we are discussing.
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The second thing I wanted to say is that it is entirely appropriate to have this debate here. I ask noble Lords to set their minds back 200 years, although that may not be possible. It was a whole series of British innovations, by people who thought originally and did not accept the limitations under which they worked at the time, which set off the Industrial Revolution, which of course is largely responsible for creating the world as we know it today. It is appropriate that we have this sort of wide-ranging discussion because you could, in one sense, say that our predecessors brought about the conditions which we now have to take steps to correct. It is a pleasure to be doing this.
I want to come back to the opening remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, where he implied that shale gas was not perhaps that significant an issue. For me, disregarding the fact that the amendment is only making two years’ difference in the way we take our decisions, this is the reason why it should not in fact be passed, The thing about shale gas is that it is very much an unknown quantity: it could be a game-changer but it might not be. I do not think we should hasten towards long-term decisions, which will set the investment climate, unless we are fairly sure of the ground on which we stand. Shale gas is not a British or a United States issue but a global one. We know that there are large deposits in the Mediterranean and I understand that there are large deposits in many parts of China. There are presumably large deposits elsewhere in the world, so this is an issue that we have to take care of.
So far as I am concerned, shale has the potential—I would put it no higher than that—to be a real interim technology that can change the nature of the game. Some of the environmental lobbies do not like it, as it is a fossil fuel. When I was first here, a Member of this House at the time said to me that we should remember that all our energy sources are nuclear. We can have our nuclear power station here or we can have it 98 million miles away, but we should remember, when we discuss fossil fuels, that they are nothing more than geologically stored solar energy. Those who deride these technologies need to put their thinking caps on.
The second thing about shale gas is that it would enable a revolution in electricity generation, because of not one but two factors. In conjunction with carbon capture and storage, it should be possible to reduce carbon emissions from electricity generation to almost, if not completely, zero. However, much more important than that, the technology is very clean. One of the things that appals me about our electricity generating industry is that, historically, because it has been a pretty dirty technology, it has had to be sited very far from large communities and conurbations. With clean technology, we could site power generation on the urban fringe, which could bring about a revolution in power generation, because we could use the waste heat productively in the community to heat homes. That is a major consideration as far as I am concerned. It is all very well having a nuclear power station out in the Severn estuary but it means that the energy efficiency of that power station is somewhere between only 40% and 50%, rather like an internal combustion engine. If we want to get efficient generation, we have to find a way of using that waste heat. That is, in a sense, a red herring in terms of the debate, but it is the reason why I do not think that these amendments should pass. I think we need more time to find out what we are really dealing with.