Energy Bill [Lords] — House of Commons, 2016-03-14
Topic: Environment
Paul Christopher Blomfield (Labour, Centre-left): I shall speak briefly in support of new clause 11, to which I am delighted to have added my name, and I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) for the amendment, the consensual way in which he has built the discourse around it, and the work that he did as the country’s first Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Climate change is an issue on which all of us have been lobbied by many groups. Most strikingly for me, I was lobbied last year by a group of students from Notre Dame school, a secondary school on the edge of my constituency, who came to Westminster to make the point that their generation was conscious of the consequences they would face if our generation failed to act. It is an incredibly powerful point, but our responsibility goes beyond the immediate generation A report published only last month in the journal Nature Climate Change pointed out that much of the discourse has been focused on the consequences of failing to act by the end of this century. Looking beyond that, the problems are even more serious. According to one of authors, "We are making choices that will affect our grandchildren’s grandchildren and beyond." He continued: "We need to think carefully about the long timescales of what we are unleashing." That was Professor Daniel Schrag from Harvard University The need to act, and to act more ambitiously, has never been clearer. The agreement of the Paris summit is a step forward, but as last month’s report highlighted, even if global warming is capped at Governments’ target of 2 oC, which is already seen as difficult, 20% of the world’s population will eventually have to migrate away from coasts swamped by rising oceans. Cities including New York, London, Rio de Janeiro, Cairo, Calcutta, Jakarta and Shanghai would all be submerged. We have seen the struggle to grapple with the refugee crisis that has grown over the last couple of years, a crisis driven by war in one country and a number of other related conflicts. Imagine for a moment what we will face if 20% of the world’s population is forced to do what people have always done when their homes become uninhabitable—to move to somewhere better. So we need greater ambition and a greater sense of urgency. That is provided by new clause 11. In the words of Professor Thomas Stocker from the University of Bern, one of the other authors of the report: "The actions of the next 30 years are absolutely crucial for putting us on a path that avoids" the worst outcomes "and ensuring, at least in the next 200 years, the impacts are limited and give us time to adapt." The reservations that the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Callum McCaig) expressed in his comments on the new clause are taken into account in the careful and thoughtful way that the clause has been drafted and the role that it provides for the Committee on Climate Change. What we need is the ambition embodied in the clause. As my right hon. Friend said, we did it with the Climate Change Act 2008, passed with all-party support, which sent a signal to the world. We can do that again; we cannot afford not to. The future is bleak if we do not cut our emissions further than Paris suggested The role that the new clause proposes for the Committee on Climate Change is important for the robustness of that ambition and its workability. I am pleased to hear the constructive engagement that there has been between my right hon. Friend and the Secretary of State. I hope that in her comments later we will hear that together we can move forward on the issue.