Barry Gardiner MP: Climate Timeline

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Barry Gardiner's Climate-related Tweets, Speeches & Votes

We've found the following climate-related tweets, speeches & votes by Barry Gardiner in the last 90 days

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• 24 Jan 2025: Parliamentary Speech

  I pay tribute to the hon. Member for South Cotswolds (Dr Savage) for introducing the Bill; it has had a very long gestation, involving many Members on both sides of the House, but it is good that it has cross-party support. Indeed, the first thing I want to focus on is the importance of cross-party support. These issues had cross-party support in the House for many years following the Climate Change Act 2008, and that continued until about 2015. That was tremendously important in the progress that not only we but the world were able to make. People saw that it was possible for Parliament to come together and do things that were considered radical to tackle climate change. Latterly, unfortunately, that consensus has broken down somewhat, and it is important—it is the duty of all Members of the House—to try to repair that consensus and to build on it. Unless we do, we will face the sort of future that the hon. Lady and the right hon. Member for Herne Bay and Sandwich outlined.

  Those objectives are the climate and nature targets, and it is great that the Bill makes the link between the two; that is fundamentally important. However, I want to counsel against annual targets in this regard. As we know—it is well documented in the OEP report that the hon. Lady referred to, as well as in the Climate Change Committee’s reports—there is natural fluctuation annually in what happens around us. Sometimes that is because of the El Niño effect, and sometimes it is for other reasons—nobody in the House will be more familiar with the El Niño effect on the oceans than the hon. Lady. It is important that we understand that sometimes an annual target, to be consistent with the five-year targets and the overall long-term target, will look like it is going backwards. We need to look at that very carefully in the Bill.

  I gently point out, however, that the climate assembly disagreed with some of the things that the Committee on Climate Change told us were essential to do. The 66% figure in the clause is actually quite a low threshold. Sometimes the report from the climate assembly was clear that people were not prepared to go as far as the Committee on Climate Change and other nature organisations, such as the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, believed was imperative. On who is in charge, there is a failure to connect things up, because the clause says that if something is recommended by 66% of the assembly, it must be included in the strategy. We will need to go through those areas in serious detail.

  Finally, it is important that the Bill talks about the impact of climate, biodiversity and nature on each other. I pick up on what the right hon. Member for Herne Bay and Sandwich— the grandfather of the House, as he styled himself—said about Drax. We are going down the wrong road with Drax. I understand the reasons why: Drax power station provides 4% of UK electricity in the power sector. It seen as an important area, so the question is, if we take it away, how will we fill it? But we cannot allow the damage to old growth and to virgin forests that we know is happening in Canada. More than that, as has been said by the noble Lord Birt, who has also seen some of the whistleblowers’ accounts, as I have, those accounts make it clear that the Ofgem investigation was correct in saying that the sustainability of the feedstock had been not only misreported but deliberately misreported. That means that the people concerned in Drax are not fit and proper to run the company, and we should not be paying them—at the moment—£9 billion. We have now to decide whether we will subsidise that even further. The impact on biodiversity is disastrous, and although they say it is renewable, it is not within the timeframe to meet the 2050 climate target. It is salient that the previous Secretary of State, after she ceased to be the Secretary of State, said, “We knew all along that this was not sustainable.” If that is the case, perhaps she should have done something when she was Secretary of State, but it is this Government who must now act to ensure that no further subsidy is paid to Drax.

  Full debate: Climate and Nature Bill

• 21 Jan 2025: Parliamentary Speech

  I commend the previous Government for much of the work they did. I commend the fact that they put in place the Environment Act 2021. I do so because it is really important that we adopt a bipartisan approach to these matters. When we are talking about the environment and climate change, yes in this Chamber we can have some political point scoring occasionally, but it is much more important that we create the bipartisan platform that means successive Governments can build and work from it.

  Full debate: Environmental Protection

• 28 Nov 2024: Parliamentary Speech

  Climate change represents a significant threat to marine life and the fisheries that depend on a healthy ecosystem, but it was not climate change that collapsed those stocks; it was heavy and constant overfishing. We sometimes hear big fishing interests blame climate change for the collapse, and it certainly makes the recovery of those populations harder, but the truth is that we consistently set catch limits above scientifically advised levels. That has crashed those stocks and will continue to do so as long as Ministers are prepared to go into the negotiations and ignore the science.

  In introducing the debate, the right hon. Gentleman spoke about climate change and cod stocks. In recent years, every time quotas for North sea cod have been set at sustainable levels in accordance with the science, the stocks of cod have increased. Every time quotas have been set out of line with the science, the stocks have declined. Our understanding of the additional pressures of climate change should be driving us to be even more precautionary in our approach to the protection of fish stocks—not to be pretending that it is the cause of their collapse. While I am thinking about cod and the remarks made by my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes (Melanie Onn) about the processing industry, I should say that the cod that comes to Grimsby is predominantly from Greenland, Norway and Iceland, which have a much more precautionary approach to setting the quota.

  Full debate: Fishing Industry

• 27 Nov 2024: Tweet

  The right tree. In the right place…. At the right time My exchange with Professor Piers Forster, the Chair of the Climate Change Committee. https://x.com/BarryGardiner/status/1861887589675925789/video/1 [Source]