My Lords, as a Member of Parliament, I was unable to vote for the original climate change legislation. It seemed to be totally unrealistic, it was likely to be extremely expensive, and I thought it would be self-defeating. It was quite obvious that a large number of important economies around the world would not adopt this. It was extremely likely that an economy such as China would use the huge opportunity of our self-inflicted wound to export more and more to us—burning lots of coal and gas and marine diesel to get it here—and that we would deindustrialise too rapidly. Of course, that is exactly what is happening.
Lord Deben has just asserted that we have not deindustrialised, but he needs to look at the facts. We are losing massive amounts of traditional industry in petrochemicals, ceramics, glass and glass fibre. Many companies have gone down, many plants are being closed, and we are losing our traditional steel industry. It is true that we have had great success in industries such as pharmaceuticals. That may have been what my noble friend had in mind with the figures he was quoting, but he cannot get away from the fact that this is now doing huge damage: closing factories, closing plants, and causing a loss of jobs.
My first objection to the Government’s proposal tonight is that we should not adopt a very tough national carbon budget without knowing what the impact is going to be on carbon dioxide produced elsewhere in the world. You need to look at the net position, not just at the UK’s position. I suspect that the future will be like the last 20 years: there will not be a big net reduction in world CO. There will probably be an increase in world CO, because of all the extra marine diesel needed for the imports; because of a shift from gas down a pipe from our own fields to LNG, which my noble friend on the Front Bench has stressed is much more CO intensive; and because, for traditional industrial products, we will be more and more dependent on countries that may use methods that are more CO intensive—as well as all the obvious extra environmental costs those countries will incur, from the way they get the raw materials out of the ground, to the social costs of the conditions of labour that they use for producing the products, and the extra transport involved in the imports.
My second big objection to this order is cost. We are given a provisional figure of £880 billion, or £35 billion a year. My noble friend is right that this is likely to be a gross underestimate of the true cost.
I challenge the Minister on how much he thinks grid expansion will cost, because the grid expansion will have to be on a completely unprecedented scale. When all the energy sources come from renewables, rather than the more dependable gas-fired sources—which do not need nearly so much grid—the Minister will need a much bigger grid to deliver the current amount of power that we need. Further, since electricity is still a minority part of the power we use, if we are going to treble or quadruple our use of electricity to replace the gas that we burn in our home heating, and the petrol and diesel we burn in our transport, the mind boggles at just how many pylons there will need to be around the country, and at just how much grid capacity there will have to be to deliver all that extra power.
The Minister also needs to understand that, while he is right legally that he can meet his commitments now by coming up with a—probably completely fictional—plan for the amount of carbon the country will produce over the next 12 to 16 years, he does not have to show in any detail how we might get there. My advice to all Governments is not to try to predict the future beyond 10 years, because nobody can. Everything is going to change. A year ago, we could not even predict who the Prime Minister of the current Government was going to be, but we meet tonight on the eve of a new Prime Minister. So how on earth can we predict how big the UK economy is going to be in 2040? How can we predict whether any of our industry of a traditional kind will survive or not? How can we predict what the technologies will be? It may be that the so-called new technologies around the lithium-ion battery—currently the main marketing ploy of those who favour this kind of policy—will be completely old hat in 10 or 15-years’ time. There may be something genuinely better. There may be an electric product that I want to buy because it works well and is genuinely cheaper.
My next challenge to the Minister is that I do not believe this line that electricity is cheap and will get cheaper with the more renewables we use. The evidence is there for all to see. We have gone further than most with renewables. We have the dearest electricity in the advanced world, and one of the reasons for that is the cost of renewable—a lot of renewable power is contracted at very high guaranteed prices. Worse still, we need the gas power stations, and we need to pay them for doing nothing, because you need the backup. Of course it is going to be a lot dearer to have electricity from renewables, because you have to pay twice to have two different lots of capital equipment. The Minister has wisely limited my time, so I will have to suffice with just those few very strong objections. I back my noble friend’s amendment.