Action on Climate Change and Decarbonisation — House of Commons, 2022-07-05
Topic: Environment
Christopher James Skidmore (Conservative, Centre-right): With respect, I do not. We do not have any more time. We have 28 years until 2050. It has been 30 years since we began these discussions and since the formation of the United Nations framework convention on climate change. We have seen the emission, since 1990, of 50% of all carbon dioxide emitted by the world in the entirety of human history. The argument that we need to go more slowly belies the fact that net zero is the slowest possible path on which we can travel while hopefully retaining a chance of hitting 1.5°. The consequences of not hitting 1.5°, or 2°, or even 4°, God forbid, will be more catastrophic for local businesses, and for farmers such as the hon. Gentleman’s friend The Po valley, normally one of the wettest areas of Italy, is now dry because seawater is flooding into the river. That is the reality of what is happening. Farmers throughout the world are, because of climate change, becoming less productive, and are becoming unable to produce the food that they once could. We need to be able to look them in the face. We, the industrialised nations that have this leadership, need to take action to ensure that all countries take this opportunity while we still have time—and that time is, sadly, ticking away Let me turn to the details of the estimates. My right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne) referred to the estimate from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, which is on page 9 of the Library pack. It claims that "£11.6 billion for the £400 energy bills reduction announced as part of the Cost-of-Living measures package" contributes to the net zero target. That is simply not true. The £400 that is going out of the door to subsidise gas and other fossil fuel usage is exactly the same amount that a household would save every single year in a property that was in band C of the energy performance certificate rating. This is the economic reality of net zero. Once a capital cost investment is made, we are looking at savings, year in, year out, whether that is through the production of renewable wind or solar energy, or through energy efficiency. That is what we need to be talking about when we are discussing net zero measures, not the false creative accounting that we see in the estimates We should also look at the Treasury’s spending plans for net zero. My right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow mentioned the period 2023-24, when the plan is for spending to rise to £8 billion a year, before it falls back to £7.7 billion in 2024-25, so actually we are going backwards. Of course we want to ensure that private sector uptake and investment continues; it cannot just be the state making these investments. We have to look at how we can draw in greater private sector investment, and I will come on to that in a moment. The reality is that if we have such balance sheets without having a longer-term sustainable programme for delivering net zero, we will always have these measures We need a coalescing target, just as net zero-ers have been able to coalesce around a single target. When I was Science and Research Minister, we had a target spend of 2.4% of both public and private gross domestic product on research and development by 2027, although we may fall short of that. Other countries such as China are going to hit 3.5%, and countries such as Israel are already about to hit 5% of GDP, both public and private, on R&D. Yesterday, the Prime Minister talked about spending 2.5% of GDP on defence by 2050. Where is the GDP target figure for net zero? We should set ourselves a far-reaching goal, and commit ourselves to that spending, both private and public, to demonstrate the investment that is needed for net zero There are far too many small pots of funding—we have talked about the green homes grant—and that creates a concertina effect, whereby people apply for a funding scheme, but we do not have the skills to deliver the product that is needed. As a result, these programmes ultimately do not achieve the targets they set out to achieve. I believe that moving away from small pots of funding to longer-term plans through which we can finance net zero should be the way forward. To deliver that, we should think about setting a net zero finance target for the UK every year, and on estimates day, we should talk about that, rather than using false figures in our accounting to claim that we have delivered an additional budgetary impact on net zero.