Paris Climate Change Conference — House of Commons, 2015-11-19
Topic: Environment
David Mowat (Conservative, Centre-right): It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband), who made an excellent speech. I regret to tell the House that I am the first speaker this afternoon who has not read the encyclical, but I shall be speaking specifically about the Paris agreement: what the objectives are; whether we appear to be on track to meet them, and, given that we are not, where the problem is; what structural issues in my view we need to address, which are similar to, but not the same as, the ones we have just heard; and what all that means for UK policy The objective of the Paris summit is the 2° limit. In objective terms, that means either 1,000 gigatonnes of carbon, or something like 550 parts per million of carbon. In truth, there are a lot of probabilities around that: we could meet the targets and still have more than a 2° increase; we could fail to meet them and get less. Nevertheless, those are the numbers we are dealing with. The right hon. Member for Doncaster North made the point that on current progress we will have reached 75% by 2030. A figure I prefer to use is that by 2036 it will have all gone: by 2036, our business-as-usual scenario will be finished Are we on track or not? A couple of Members have mentioned the intended nationally determined contributions. However, about only 80% of all participants in Paris have delivered them. The first problem with the INDCs—this is an indicator of the issues the Secretary of State will have to face—is that we could not even agree a common benchmark or starting point for the INDCs. The Europeans prefer 1990 and the Americans prefer 2005. We both have our own reasons: they make us look better It is not surprising, given that we could not agree a benchmark or common template, that the INDCs, 80% of which are now in, are all over the place. The right hon. Member for Doncaster North said they implied a 3° outcome. I find this surprising. A report by the secretariat of the United Nations framework convention on climate change mentioned 2.73°. This is an optimistic analysis—that is unusual as these guys are usually over-pessimistic—because it assumes we will continue on broadly the same trajectory after the initial INDC period. That will be hard, however, because there are low-hanging fruit and it will be easier to make progress on the first things. The other key points are that we need five-year reviews and that only the EU and China have put in place policies reflecting their INDCs, suggesting that regulating the process might be harder than we think Where is the problem? It is not the UK. The Climate Change Act mandates an 80% reduction in emissions over 60 years: a rate of 1.33% a year, which is significantly higher than the EU INDC in Paris. I would like a Front-Bench spokesperson to contradict me if I am wrong, because it is an important point. The Act commits the UK to an emissions target 33% higher than the EU INDC submission, of which we are part. That is an extraordinary statistic. With our policies—the carbon budgets and everything that goes with them—we have imposed on ourselves requirements more stringent than those set by the EU as a whole, let alone individual member states. I do not agree with the right hon. Gentleman that other countries have passed climate change Acts. If only they had! We expected they would—we thought we were taking a worldwide position—but it has not happened to anything like the extent we hoped it would. I note that neither Front-Bench team has intervened, so I think I am right The INDC we submitted to Paris requires a 40% emissions reduction by 2030, which is significantly less than we are legally obliged to achieve in the UK. How are some of our European partners getting on? There is a database called the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research—EDGAR—and it is a rattling good yarn. It details carbon emissions by country, capita and unit of GDP for every year up to 2013. Since 1990, Austria, a wealthy European country, has increased its emissions by 20%, while we have reduced ours by 20%, in accordance with the Climate Change Act. That is the same country, by the way, that is suing us for building nuclear power stations. Holland and Belgium are flat. Germany has reduced its emissions, but, in spite of being a leader on renewables, its emissions are 30% higher than ours per capita. That is because it is going heavily for coal, and what makes the difference on emissions is not how many renewables a country has, but how much coal it does not have. We need to examine that. That is a slightly pessimistic analysis of the INDCs—I know we are going to negotiate—but I wanted to make the point that the European submission to Paris is 33% lower than what this Parliament has already mandated for this country. I wonder why that is What is causing this apparent possibility of failure? There is actually one piece of good news from the last few years. I am pleasantly surprised that we appear to have broken the link between GDP and energy intensity. The only caveat is the issue that dare not speak its name: embedded carbon. If we have broken the link only by importing carbon in the form of embedded carbon, we will have undermined much of what we are doing A bigger issue concerns an error that was made before and at Copenhagen and by the EU, and one that we are still making—I heard it in DECC questions again today: we have tended to over-emphasise renewables targets and under-emphasise decarbonisation, yet for too long we have used those words interchangeably. I am in favour of renewables, but because all the EU targets were for renewables, not decarbonisation, we placed a false emphasis on certain technologies. In particular, we did not develop nuclear power and carbon capture and storage as quickly as we should have. That error is still being made. This morning, I received a document from Friends of the Earth in preparation for this debate. It cannot bring itself to use the words "nuclear power" in this context. I can only conclude that although it cares about climate change, it does not care enough to countenance the dominant technology that is by far the best chance the world has.