Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-09-15
Topic: Environment
John Lawrence Whitty (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I added my name to my noble friend’s amendment. When he first proposed it to me I was not quite clear what the intention was, but it is quite clear what it requires. It gives us a metric —a figure—to display to the public what is a central matter of political dispute in this and many other countries, namely the claim that to achieve green growth and a reduction of greenhouse gases is in direct conflict with the ability to grow and become more prosperous. This country is one of the few countries that has managed to resolve that over the past 20-odd years. In most years we have grown the economy and reduced our greenhouse gases. That will be more difficult in the future and it is more difficult around the world All the amendment is asking is that the Government, the Treasury and the Bank of England in particular adopt some metric as an objective of economic policy and turn the ratio between growth and the reduction in greenhouse gases into a forward-looking metric that reduces our dependency on fossil fuels while assuring the public that we are still increasing prosperity. It is possible that the econometricians, statisticians and everybody else can work out a more complex or a simpler figure, but we need one figure that on a rolling basis measures the past and gives us a target and a tool for the future, so that we can counter a very insidious position where the climate pessimists say it cannot be done Of course, the polemicists in this argument on social media and more broadly not only emphasise that position in this country; it is making life difficult in many other countries. It defined Trump’s America and to a degree still hamstrings the American Government. It means that, however sophisticated their regimes, the oil producers still trot out the conflict as an excuse for not doing anything that will lead to a meaningful delivery of either the Kyoto or the Paris commitments. Of course, the conflict and the political argument are at their most acute in the poorest countries, where constraints on fossil fuel-based energy are seen as a barrier to raising the living standards of the poorest and most wretched on the earth That is why having a clear metric might help us in international negotiations as well. At present, the post-Paris commitments of each signatory are expressed in different terms. Most of them are absolute reductions in greenhouse gases, some are reductions in what they call energy intensity, and others are just lists of particular measures. It is quite difficult to determine the relativity between these different commitments and impossible to compare the level of their commitment with what are supposedly the Paris objectives If we started here and the Government committed to getting the Office for National Statistics and the other relevant bodies to address this issue and to come up with a single, clear measure—one that carries at least the broad range of political opinions in this country —we could then move on to convince the OECD and the rest of the world. We can start here. Whether in this Bill or in some other context, the Government really need to commit themselves to having a clear metric here, and I hope the Minister can give some encouragement to that view tonight.