Dan Carden MP: Climate-Related Speeches In Parliament

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Dan Carden's Speeches In Parliament Related to Climate

We've found 13 Parliamentary debates in which Dan Carden has spoken about climate-related matters.

Here are the relevant sections of their speeches.

• 15 Nov 2023: Violence Reduction, Policing and Criminal Justice

  16:47

  It is a pleasure to speak in the debate. If we needed further proof that this Government are out of ideas and time—I was not going to mention the speech made by the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Paul Holmes)—the King’s Speech provides that evidence, because it takes no action on the issues my constituents face on a daily basis. It does not even come close. It does nothing to deal with the cost of living crisis, the housing crisis or the climate crisis.

  On the climate crisis, the Government have taken this opportunity to legislate for annual oil and gas licensing rounds, deepening our dependence on dirty, expensive, volatile fossil fuels that will not only torch the climate commitments they have made, but undermine energy security. This will not bring down energy bills at home—not my words, but the words of the current Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero. Energy bills are double what they were two years ago.

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• 7 Sep 2023: UK’s Relationship with Mexico

  13:30

  We cannot treat our relationships with Latin American countries like pawns on a chessboard. We cannot view them purely as opportunities for the wealthy few to further enrich themselves. Our support for the principles of national sovereignty, self-determination and mutual respect cannot be solely symbolic. We must not appear to be more interested in protecting a few commercial interests than in building a lasting framework for international co-operation. That approach to foreign policy is not only objectionable but unsuited to the 21st century. It is plainly ineffective. As we gear up for an age of genuinely global challenges, we have to lay the foundations for meaningful multilateral action now. There are no viable solutions to problems such as climate change that do not involve closely co-ordinated international action, and Britain is incredibly well placed to play a leading role in those efforts, but to do so, we must first shed the last vestiges of colonial paternalism and single-minded self-interest. The way that we choose to manage our relationship with Mexico and other countries in the region—and countries across the global south—will determine our capacity to play that role.

  Of course, there are also the dislocating effects of climate change. As a result of its tropical latitude, Mexico is vulnerable to drought, food insecurity and the increased frequency of extreme weather events. The country’s status as one of the most biodiverse places on earth further raises the stakes. I make those points not in an accusatory way; indeed, we in Britain must reflect on how our legal and social relationship to drugs, and our consumption habits more broadly, contribute to the enormous human cost borne by the American people. I draw attention to those issues rather to remind Members that the UK has to, as a matter of course, assert its commitment to supporting Mexico, and to helping it tackle these substantial challenges—not as a finger-wagging imperial power, but as an equal partner sincerely invested in that country’s success.

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• 5 Sep 2023: Climate Finance: Tackling Loss and Damage

  10:03

  This is an important debate. In March this year, I was proud to be elected president of the Forum of Young Parliamentarians of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, which is like a United Nations of legislatures. It represents 180 national Parliaments around the world. I vow to use the position to make young people’s voices heard on the world stage. I hope my contribution will be a small part of fulfilling that promise, because young people will be not only the victims of climate change but the greatest contributors to action against it. It is a profound injustice that those least responsible for causing the climate emergency will suffer the worst of its consequences. At the same time, debt burdens and increased food and energy prices mean that many climate-vulnerable countries have less fiscal capacity to deal with those consequences—for adaptation, mitigation, loss and damage, or the resulting harms to health, the environment and ways of life.

  I welcome the confirmation, in an answer to my written question, that it remains the Government’s intention to deliver £11.6 billion of UK international climate finance between April 2021 and March 2026. I hope, however, that the Minister will stand up to those in his own party who would like to see the UK abandon that commitment. I urge him to take the opportunity today to clarify how the UK will meet its commitments within the existing timeframe, including front loading climate finance and showing how that climate finance will be new and additional.

  To meet our commitments, however, we need to go further. We must properly tax the big polluters; we know that fossil fuel corporations knew the harms their products were causing. They covered up the science for years, funded disinformation and spread doubt, delaying action that could have saved countless lives. Those very same companies are currently raking in obscene, record-breaking profits, predominantly due to the effects of the war in Ukraine. Polluters must begin compensating for the destruction they have caused to our environment and to the lives of the people who have done the very least to cause the climate emergency.

  My colleagues have made the case for a moral responsibility for loss and damage. It is also in our economic self-interest, however, to take greater action now. We must build on the breakthrough agreements of last year’s COP. Now is the time to operationalise the loss and damage fund—to put the money in and to get it working—in order to direct finance to those communities with the greatest need. I will continue to make those calls, alongside colleagues, and I will be proud to make them at COP28, which I hope to attend in my new role later this year. The Minister should rest assured that young people will continue to make those calls until they are listened to.

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• 2 May 2023: Oral Answers to Questions

  I think the Foreign Secretary will agree that the voices of young people should be heard loudly in climate negotiations, so will he speak with Cabinet colleagues and set out a plan for how youth negotiators can form an integral part of this country’s delegation to COP28 later this year?

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• 20 Apr 2023: International Trade and Geopolitics

  12:57

  Mexico’s appetite for cutting-edge financial tech products and services makes it a natural destination for UK-based fintech start-ups and more traditional financial investment. Mexico also offers significant opportunities for trade in clean technologies. It has had rapidly growing electric vehicle production and export in recent years, and I have no doubt that our growing trading relationship will make it an indispensable partner in our common fight against climate change.

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• 2 Nov 2022: Topical Questions

  I welcome the Minister to her new role. As we all know, Shell is making windfall profits—more than double those last year. Despite that, it is not paying a penny of the UK’s windfall tax, because of a get-out clause that obscenely incentivises new oil and gas extraction in the UK. Given that we know that drilling for more fossil fuels is incompatible with the target of 1.5°C to avert climate catastrophe, will the Government now remove that loophole?

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• 1 Feb 2022: Oil and Gas Producers: Windfall Tax

  17:42

  To manage security of supply when gas is being used as a geopolitical tool is bigger than an economic issue. To decarbonise energy is also bigger than the forces of supply and demand, and to stop energy bills wiping out the income and savings of families up and down the country is a matter of social justice. The market provides no solutions to those problems. The only way to resolve those issues is to have a Government with the will to act and to put the interests of the people we in this House are supposed to represent above the interests of big energy companies and their shareholders. Sadly, that seems a long way off.

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• 29 Jan 2020: Oral Answers to Questions

  I am afraid that that is just not good enough. Last week’s UK-Africa investment summit cost the Department more than £15 million of aid money, on a one-day event. I wonder whether the Secretary of State can say now whether any of that money was spent on business-class flights or five-star hotels, because the Department will not disclose the figures until autumn 2021. At the summit, almost £2 billion-worth of new energy deals were struck for fossil fuels. How on earth can he justify using taxpayers’ funds to help fossil fuel companies when we are in the midst of a climate catastrophe?

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• 13 Jan 2020: Britain in the World

  21:32

  As we start a new decade and look towards a new era of Britain outside the EU, the big question for us all in this Parliament is what type of country do we want to be on the world stage? Who will our allies and partners be in the months and years to come? Who will we side with? Will we side with human rights abusers, bully-boy Presidents, warmongers and those who seek to wreck our environment, or will we be on the side of international law and human rights, promoting peace and diplomacy? Will we stand alongside people across the globe who are fighting for a more just world, to end global poverty, inequality, conflict and climate catastrophe?

  As one of the richest countries in the world, there should be no question about our playing a role in fighting the biggest global challenges of our time: unprecedented inequality, with 26 individuals owning the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of humanity; rising global hunger, with 800 million people not having enough food to eat; forced displacement on an unimaginable scale; conflicts with no end in sight; and a catastrophic climate crisis. If we are going to tackle those challenges, there is a lot that Britain needs to do differently on the world stage, from ensuring fairer trade deals, clamping down on global tax-dodging, preventing countries from falling into debt crises and reshaping our relations with countries in the global south so that they are no longer based on the extraction of resources and exploitation of people. Putting those structural issues aside, keeping DFID would be the smallest gesture we can make.

  The UK will host COP26 in Glasgow later this year. It will be a pivotal moment in the fight for climate justice. We welcome the Government’s commitment to binding targets to net zero, and of course we want the Government to go further. These targets mean nothing unless the UK takes swift action now, and there are just 10 short months left until the summit. We must remember that this is not a problem for the future; people across the global south are already suffering the reality of the climate catastrophe. The UK must make serious progress on transforming our own economy and bringing emissions down right away if, as host, we are to lead and persuade others to follow. What exactly will the Government do in the coming months to prove that Britain is serious about cutting emissions, and what exactly will the Prime Minister be doing right away to bring the small subset of obstructive leaders, including President Trump, on board with the world’s climate agreement?

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• 17 Jul 2019: Oral Answers to Questions

  The UK is the largest contributor to the World Bank’s climate investment funds, yet civil society groups say that, compared with UN funds, those funds are undemocratic, opaque and dominated by donor countries. The Secretary of State has committed to doubling DFID’s climate spending, but does he think that the World Bank’s climate investment funds are fit for purpose?

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  I am grateful to the Secretary of State for that answer, but the truth is that the World Bank knows that it was supposed to phase out its climate investment funds once the United Nations green climate fund was up and running. Labour is clear: we believe in climate justice and we are committed to withdrawing the UK’s support for the World Bank’s climate investment funds and to redirecting climate finance to the UN green climate fund, in which developing countries get a real say. Will the Government now do the same?

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• 10 Jul 2019: Climate Change, the Environment and Global Development

  15:46

  It is just two months since Labour secured the support of this House for our becoming the first Parliament in the world to declare a climate emergency. We called then on the Government to commit to net zero carbon emissions by 2050. It was a small but important step and a reminder that real change comes from below. What a testament it is to those young activists striking from school and to the extinction rebellion movements that they have changed the tone of debate in this country so irreversibly. What a testament it is to their moral leadership that Secretaries of State and prime ministerial contenders in the Conservative party are now scrambling to demonstrate their green credentials, albeit, I would say, not that convincingly. It is a testament to their activism that a Prime Minister whose first act in office was to shut down the Department for Energy and Climate Change is now trying to make it her last act to create a climate legacy that she desperately hopes she might be remembered for.

  That said, sounding the alarm and setting out promises for 30 years away is not enough. Politicians have known about the impact of climate breakdown for decades but have continued to pour billions into fossil fuel industries while offering little more than thoughts and prayers to those in the global south being hit hardest by the consequences.

  I gently say to the hon. Gentleman that he is rather letting down his side of the House. When the Climate Change Act was passed in 2008, a radical consensus had been forged in this House such that this issue was above party politics. Unlike in other countries where climate change is a party political issue, we are united in this House in wanting to tackle it. It is one thing to have a robust debate on the means to the ends, but we are all united around those ends.

  The language that we use in this debate is important, and it is important that we are now calling this climate emergency what it is, but unless we as a House act faster to deliver action, these will be nothing more than warm words. It is clear that we must be far more ambitious about international climate action that serves the interests of the world’s poorest, and not just its elites. We must act now, and go further and faster than ever before.

  On the issue of international action, does the hon. Gentleman agree that aviation and shipping emissions ought to be included in the Government’s net zero strategy? The Committee on Climate Change has said that they should be included, but we have heard nothing from the Government to suggest that they are going to include them.

  The shadow Chancellor recently spoke at length about the preparations that Labour is making to roll out a climate emergency programme should there be a general election this autumn. We are working on a range of ambitious new policy proposals that we think will turbo-charge our effort. We want to be as ambitious as possible, and we are looking into how we can bring forward the target date for net zero emissions.

  Let us examine the Government’s international actions on fossil fuels, climate finance, and global climate justice. Take the Prosperity Fund, set up by this Government, plagued by scandal, and funded to the tune of £1.2 billion from the aid budget. In October 2018, it was found that 29% of its energy spending was on fossil fuel projects, including projects to expand the oil and gas sectors in Brazil and Mexico and support for fracking in China. Or take CDC Group, which is wholly owned by the Department for International Development: it, too, continues to invest directly in fossil fuels. Then—as has been mentioned—there is UK Export Finance, 97% of whose support for energy in developing countries is going to fossil fuels, with less than 1% going to renewable energy. The Minister was keen to give examples of support for renewables, but the statistics are stark and speak for themselves.

  Let us take the Foreign Secretary and Conservative leadership contender. He talks a good game on the climate emergency, but in April this year, during his first official visit to Africa, he announced an agreement that will allow money from UK Export Finance to support the building of offshore oil and gas installations in Senegal by British companies BP and Cairn Energy. Or take the UK’s failure to use its influence in the big multilateral development banks, such as the World Bank, to ensure that their investment strategies are aligned to help us hit the Paris agreement’s target.

  I want to say a few words about climate finance. The signatories to the Paris agreement have committed to finding at least $100 billion just for mitigation and adaptation in developing countries, but even that number is extremely conservative; UN Environment estimates that the real number for mitigation and adaptation alone could in fact be as high as £500 billion by 2050. So why does the UK not have a serious climate finance strategy? In its most recent report in May the International Development Committee called again for one to be given to Parliament, and I urge the Minister today to set out exactly when that will happen.

  I turn now to how the UK can tackle the root causes of climate emergency, rather than just manage the decline of our planet. It must not be the role of the British Government and the British taxpayer to throw money at clearing up the mess left behind by the world’s biggest polluters simply so that they can carry on polluting. The truth is that our global economic model is fundamentally broken; it is a system that is driving us towards disaster in the quest to accumulate ever more wealth and extract ever more profit. Unless there is a UK Government who are serious about transitioning away from our current economic model, however ambitious our international action is it will only tackle the symptoms of climate change, never its root causes.

  It is a tragedy that those least responsible for the climate crisis will be the first to suffer its consequences. It is not the world’s billionaires who are suffering the worst effects of planetary breakdown, and we should be under no illusions: they are making plans not to fix our economic model, but to escape, survive and ride out the catastrophe.

  I want to bring to the House’s attention the writings of the technology writer Douglas Rushkoff, who last year recounted how he was brought in as an expert adviser to a room of billionaires to talk about climate change. He was flabbergasted when, instead of asking him about how to prevent the climate catastrophe or what role they could play, they asked him about how they could insulate themselves from the danger, including, amazingly, the use of disciplinary collars to maintain the loyalty of their private security forces to protect them when society finally broke down and when wages and money no longer held sway. That is quite remarkable.

  The time for tinkering around the edges is over. To avert climate catastrophe we must radically restructure our economy here in the UK and globally so that it works for the many, not the few. We should consider this: if global growth continues at 3% each year the global economy will have doubled in size by 2043, and so too will material consumption unless we can de-link it from economic growth. For too long we have ignored the plain fact that we cannot sustain permanent growth on a planet of finite resources. That is exactly why we need the kind of systemic change that our shadow Chancellor has spoken about, and it is why we must use and harness every policy lever available to us and ensure that the state and the private sector invest in the infrastructure to bring about the next green industrial revolution. And that is why we must work with the City to reform and why we must use our influence on the global stage to promote a more democratic global economy.

  As part of the radical agenda that my hon. Friend rightly says is required if we are to deal with the climate emergency, does he share my view that three things in particular are needed: radical decarbonising of our current energy set-up; an acceleration of investment in electric vehicle infrastructure; and a significant increase in tree cover in the UK?

  Under Labour, the Department for International Development will play a crucial role in global climate justice, and two of our five top international development priorities are to catalyse a global ecological transition and to help build a fairer global economy. We are hearing a lot about a global green new deal across countries, and Labour envisages a green industrial revolution right here in the UK, but we must be clear that the ultimate test of any such deal is whether it will solve the climate emergency, deliver decent green jobs, produce a better quality of life and, critically, bring about climate justice for the world’s poorest, because that is exactly what we must bring about.

  We are talking about nothing less than a great transition in how we structure our economies and societies, and that is why I want to end on a note of hope. We spend a lot of time talking about the catastrophe that is starting to unfold and the existential threat facing the planet. The vested interests are so strong that we must keep campaigning and fighting and, yes, the media barons are not always on our side on this one. They tell us that anyone who speaks up on the climate emergency is simply insisting that we all have to make terrible personal sacrifices such as cutting our holidays or our use of plastic straws. I understand why the narrative of fear can prevail, but what the climate emergency is really about is pointing the way to the better world that we all want to live in. This is about levelling things up and radically slashing inequality. It is about our children having clean air to breathe and greener public spaces to play in. It is about living on a planet with millions more trees, travelling on better public transport and having meaningful, decent green jobs in democratically owned companies that put people and planet before profit.

  My right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) wrote powerfully last week that, on the climate emergency, we need to

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• 11 Jun 2019: Sustainable Development Goals

  15:43

  Another major barrier to achieving the SDGs both domestically and globally is this Government’s policy incoherence. I welcome the Secretary of State’s plans to prioritise the climate crisis, which is crucial to achieving goals 13 and 7 on climate action and on clean energy, but his colleagues do not appear to be on the same page. It is this Government who have shut down the dedicated Department of Energy and Climate Change. It is this Government who continue to promote fracking and support the growth of fossil fuels overseas; over 99% of all energy support provided by UK Export Finance goes to fossil fuels. And it is this Government who continue to spend our aid money on new oil and gas projects overseas through the prosperity fund and CDC investments.

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• 1 May 2019: Climate Change

  The Labour party has committed to divesting DFID of all fossil fuel projects, which directly undermine the global goals on climate and sustainable energy.

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See all Parliamentary Speeches Mentioning Climate