Graham Stringer MP: Climate-Related Speeches In Parliament

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Graham Stringer's Speeches In Parliament Related to Climate

We've found 31 Parliamentary debates in which Graham Stringer has spoken about climate-related matters.

Here are the relevant sections of their speeches.

• 29 Oct 2024: Great British Energy Bill

  17:15

  Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that this debate would be much easier if the Committee on Climate Change had produced a year-by-year estimate of the costs of getting to net zero by 2050? The previous Government always promised to do a proper impact assessment on costs, but they never did. I believe that this Government should do that, so we can have an objective and evidence-based debate. Does he agree?

  I have some sympathy with the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Brighton Pavilion (Siân Berry) in respect of the impacts on nature. I come from one of the most beautiful parts of the United Kingdom—the Antrim coast is famous for tourism—and I am already seeing the impact of net zero policies on the landscape and the flora and fauna of the Antrim plateau. When I look out of my window in the morning, there is the wind farm that has been erected on top of the plateau, which involved stripping off 3 metres of peat and destroying a bird habitat; every year these windmills chew up birds and bats. I have already mentioned the admission that 17 million trees had been cut down in Scottish forests, and the hon. Member for Brighton Pavilion was unfortunate to mention the Sperrins, another beautiful part of Northern Ireland of which I have some knowledge and which has been totally despoiled by hundreds of windmills.

  The Conservatives are generally adamant that there very are few Labour Members with any business experience, so having spent more than 30 years in business—latterly in electric vehicle charging infrastructure—I was reassured to learn while listening to the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Dr Mullan) that there is at least one Conservative who is not a renewable-energy Luddite, and I am glad to see him back in his place. I wish that the right hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson) would spend a bit of time understanding a little more about geothermal energy, which does not require the wind to blow or the sun to shine.

  I was honoured to be part of the Committee considering the Great British Energy Bill, a core plank of this Government’s policy programme whose benefits will be felt in every corner of the UK, including my own constituency of Camborne, Redruth and Hayle. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and the Under-Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, my hon. Friend the Member for Rutherglen (Michael Shanks), for their diligent work on and defence of this transformational Bill. Let me also put on record my thanks not just to my right hon. and hon. Friends who sat on the Committee, but to other Members on both sides of the House who contributed to it.

  Renewable energy—onshore wind, offshore wind, geothermal, tidal and solar—and critical minerals such as tin, lithium, tungsten and manganese are fundamental for our transition away from fossil fuels. There is no silver bullet; we need a mix of renewable energy, which will form part of our policy going forward. That is what GB Energy will give us the opportunity to do.

  There are few areas of the UK where there is a greater distillation of renewable energy and critical mineral opportunities than in Cornwall. I refer to the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) about human rights and the opportunity to produce domestically an awful lot of the energy and the critical minerals that we currently import from places such as China, Indonesia, Australia and South America. As a result, there are extremely high expectations in Cornwall for local jobs in industries that support community initiatives and domestic supply chains in one of the most deprived areas of northern Europe.

  [Source]

• 12 Sep 2024: New Housing: Environmental Standards

  15:00

  The Climate Change Committee did a report on the UK’s housing stock in 2019. It estimated that in 2050 80% of houses in this country will be houses that are already built, so we clearly have a massive job to do when we think about environmental standards and retrofitting the buildings that we already have. However, I am concerned to discuss the 20% of houses that will be new, because the worst possible outcome could be that we build lots and lots of new houses but to poor standards, thus requiring the retrofitting of those houses, too, so let us focus on new build homes.

  This is not a new topic. One of the helpful briefings I read in preparation for this debate, from the House of Commons Library, which I recommend to everyone—it produces fantastic materials—reminded me that in 2006, the then Labour Government said that they would amend the building regulations to require all new homes to have net zero carbon emissions by 2016. Of course, that policy was scrapped by the Conservatives in 2015, but we are now eight years on from the point at which Labour previously thought that all new homes should be net zero carbon. This is the moment for the new Labour Government to fulfil that promise and put in place regulations to ensure that ambition will actually come to pass—better late than never.

  I will speak today about five key aspects of environmental standards for new housing: maximising energy efficiency; minimising embodied carbon; maximising on-site energy generation, particularly rooftop solar; maximising biodiversity in the construction of new homes; and maximising resilience against things like flooding and overheating, which will become more and more important as time goes by and climate change becomes a reality that hits us ever harder.

  The first aspect is maximising energy efficiency. To meet the Government’s own carbon targets, almost all buildings will need to fully decarbonise. It is not just me who says that—it was in the Government’s heat and buildings strategy back in 2021. That is what the future homes standard was supposed to ensure. However, the version of the future homes standard that is being consulted on is looking at a 75% improvement on 2013 levels by 2030, which is neither good enough nor strong enough. We need to get to all homes being net zero carbon as soon as possible.

  I also ask the Minister to lift the restriction placed by the previous Government on local authorities setting higher standards for house building in their areas. I do not think that local authorities setting piecemeal higher standards is the way we will get to a decarbonised housing sector, but we should not hold them back from going further and faster while we wait for Government to show the necessary leadership on a national level. We have too much piecemeal policy on this, both between local authorities and between the four nations of the UK. We need to ensure that we are united in a race to the top for standards, not a race to the bottom.

  I thank the hon. Lady for securing this debate and the Minister for being here to respond. I second the hon. Lady’s point about the standards set by local authorities. I represent part of West Oxfordshire district council, where the Salt Cross development was brought forth. It was challenged by the developers because the local authority sought to set forth a net zero standard. The developers were unsuccessful in their appeal, but in a very obliging step, the previous Government issued a written ministerial statement in December 2023 clarifying that no local authority could have the power to set net zero standards. Does the hon. Lady agree that it would be very helpful if the Minister confirmed that this Government intend to issue a new written ministerial statement to make it more possible, until such time as we have new standards, for local authorities to pursue net zero targets in their planning permissions?

  My fifth point is on maximising resilience. We must face up to the fact that the climate crisis means that some extremes of weather will be baked in. We must recognise that adaptation has to be part of what we do, as well as mitigation of the climate impact.

  I have a present for the Minister to take away. A few years ago, in Herefordshire, we developed a thing called “Herefordshire Future Homes”, in which we assessed a whole range of building standards, because of the bewildering array of initiatives in place. The industry is now coalescing around the net zero housing standard, which is good news, but we also looked at things such as water efficiency, biodiversity and so on. I will give this document to the Minister after the debate to feed into his work.

  Let me remind the Minister what the Government could and should do. They could ensure that all new homes had ultra-high levels of energy efficiency and were built to an EPC A standard right now, with a glide path through to net zero housing standards as soon as possible. Let us resist the pressure from developers to water down the standards, and let us give local authorities the freedom they need to put in place higher standards initially. Let us incorporate embodied carbon in the future homes standard, and set regulations for whole-life carbon limits aligned with the industry’s building standard of net zero carbon.

  I have not mentioned this much, but waste and recycling in construction is a core and enormous part of our waste economy. There are significant opportunities for a more circular economy approach. Let us also specify that all new homes should have solar panels on top and swift bricks everywhere. Let us ensure that all new homes are climate change-resilient.

  [Source]

• 18 Apr 2024: Covid-19: Response and Excess Deaths

  15:21

  Before I go any further, let me say that my experience of the APPG, and of climate change or global warming debates, is that science and politics make very uneasy bedfellows. There is often an attempt in a political debate to resolve matters that are only resolvable by looking at the evidence, doing more experiments and finding out the truth of the matter, which is not always possible in a debate where people feel very strongly about things.

  [Source]

• 26 Jun 2023: Road User Charging Schemes

  16:30

  There are many other ways to tackle this problem, but as usual the Labour party will go for the tax lever rather than the innovation lever, and as always, the working person will suffer. I want cleaner air; I agree with net zero.

  I agree with net zero; I just think that it can be done in a better way than this. People want more power locally, but too often it is given to the wrong people. The cities that I mentioned are testimony to this statement. These schemes show how out of touch and disconnected politicians at local level are from the people and from businesses. The people and businesses do not want these schemes, but the politicians wilfully ignore their wishes, on purpose and with no care about the terrible impact the schemes have. This situation cannot be acceptable in a democracy.

  [Source]

• 19 Jul 2022: New Pylons: East Anglia

  09:30

  East Anglia Green Energy Enablement, or GREEN, is the title of the project that proposes to build a new high-voltage network reinforcement between Norwich, Bramford near Ipswich in Suffolk, and Tilbury on the Essex coast. As an MP, I have never received as many emails from my constituents about a single topic.

  The most difficult thing in the whole process is that not even the Minister for Energy, Clean Growth and Climate Change, my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Greg Hands), is accountable for what is being decided; he will tell us, “This is the framework and this is what we have to stick to.” He will then tell us that there is going to be a new proposal for a different regime that would arrive at different outcomes, but that is not going to affect this consultation, and we will be left with decisions being forced down corralled pathways by an outdated regulatory and planning framework.

  I could not agree more. We have environmental policies and net zero policies that are costing the earth, even though they are designed to save the earth—they are very important policies and we put a great deal of money into them—and yet we have other policies that despoil the environment and communities. The damage they do is not costed into the proposals.

  Dare I mention the words “judicial review”? If my constituents go for a judicial review—they are very well funded and well organised, and we are backing them—how many years will that hold up the proposal? Would it not be better for the Government to cut through and say we should go for an offshore grid, which has public support and which people recognise will help us to achieve our net zero targets more quickly and protect the environment and communities? That is what we should do.

  [Source]

• 7 Jun 2021: Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

  19:00

  Finally, I would make a point about priorities. Hon. Members have talked about climate change being the top priority; politicians are notorious for having lots and lots of top priorities, but as far as I have noticed, the top priority over the past 15 months has been dealing with covid and the coronavirus. Incidentally, after 25 conferences of the parties, the only thing that has had any impact on the steady increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been covid: the response to covid has reduced carbon dioxide for the first time since people started talking about it, essentially.

  [Source]

• 8 Jan 2020: European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

  17:00

  In case there is any ambiguity, let me give an example. Lone Pine, the big fracking company, sued the Canadian Government because Quebec had a moratorium on fracking, saying that it would affect climate change, or was not in the interests of the environment, or whatever it was. We have started fracking in this country, but let us suppose that the Welsh Government said that they did not want fracking in Wales. If there were to be an investor-state dispute settlement tribunal, the frackers could come along and say “Look here, we cannot have this, we are fracking”, and sue the British Government. Is that sovereignty and control in any normal circumstances? Of course it is not. Courts will be available that will fine, or threaten to fine, the British Government for passing legislation to protect the environment and the public health of our citizens, and their intimidation will deter future Governments from doing that.

  We have seen that already in terms of sovereignty, because we want a better environment, but the Government have already decided to withdraw from the carbon trading system, so we will have our own carbon tax. However, my understanding of the Government proposal for the carbon emissions tax is that we will charge £16 a tonne and the EU will tax £25 a tonne. In other words, we are already becoming a sort of pollution dumping ground. The more we diverge negatively away from the EU, the less we will be able to trade and the more we will be in the hands of the US, the Chinese or whoever. That is not sovereignty; that is just being in the hands of others.

  [Source]

• 15 Jul 2019: BBC

  18:16

  My background is as a scientist. I believe in the scientific method and I practised for 10 years, running an analytical laboratory, so I am not, in the way some people mean it, a climate sceptic. However, some of the science from the likes of the University of East Anglia and in the leaked emails is a bit dodgy—very dodgy in that case. Some of the policies proposed to deal with climate change are expensive and one needs to be sceptical about the cost of those policies.

  Not only is the cohort running the BBC from Oxbridge, but it is happier speaking about the subjunctive than the second law of thermodynamics. They have clear views on what the perception of science and climate change is. I will give an example, which I think is quite extraordinary. I appeared on a programme with Lord Lilley—with whom I disagree with about almost everything—about the Met Office, with Quentin Letts conducting the interview. Lord Lilley has a scientific background. He has a degree from Cambridge in physics. We agreed that climate change is happening and the planet is warming up a bit, but that the response is probably overblown. I said that the Met Office was very good at short-term forecasting, but hopeless at medium and long-term forecasts.

  [Source]

• 24 Apr 2018: Dieter Helm Energy Review

  14:30

  I said that Professor Helm was coherent, which he is, but—this will come as no surprise to the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead)—I do not agree with the objectives that Professor Helm has always agreed with. They are the Government’s objectives, too, and I will explain why I do not agree. He starts the energy review by talking about the Government’s target in the Climate Change Act 2008 to reduce carbon emissions in this country by 80% from 1990 levels by 2050. I do not agree with that, and I will explain why. However, it is the Government’s policy and the law, and that is the basis of the review. His second objective, which he took as concrete, was the security of energy supply. Along with those two objectives, he wanted to see whether costs could come down.

  Recklessly putting up the price of energy has been a huge mistake for the country. When I say that, I do not want anyone to think that I am somehow in the category of anti-science. My background is that of a scientist, and I understand the opacity or otherwise of carbon dioxide to different wavelengths of electromagnetic energy. I understand the greenhouse effect in some detail, and I do not deny its existence—I think that what its impact will be is sometimes exaggerated, but that is a debate for another day.

  On the complexity, Professor Helm’s answer to the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee was devastating, because some of the vested interests had been into the Committee previously and had lobbied. Some of the renewable energy people and some of the people from the Committee on Climate Change—all of them professors, you understand, Mr McCabe—had said, “There’s no problem with complexity whatever.” I think there is a problem, and anybody who has been in the real world for very long knows that there is a problem. Professor Helm’s key finding and recommendation on that was:

  Professor Helm criticises the Government for focusing too much on electricity and not enough on agriculture, which is a tiny part of the economy and creates about 10% of carbon dioxide emissions. He strongly believes—this should please the Government—in a free market solution. He believes that the auctions will not pick winners, but that the winners will pick themselves by being efficient in the auction process.

  I want to deal with one of the main questions put forward by my hon. Friends who represent constituencies where Vesta, for instance, produces wind turbines. That question is whether the alternative, renewable energy business would have got going without intervention. Nobody can really answer that. When all that extra cash has been put into the energy market, there are bound to be spin-off benefits, but it cannot be known at any time, unless the market is tested, whether someone could have got more bangs for their buck for investing differently.

  One area where I completely agree with Professor Helm is that we need research—not just the research carried out by vested interests who want to produce energy, but pure research. There is a long way to go in battery technology, which may be part of the solution. Unless something has happened since I left the Energy and Climate Change Committee, we do not even have a proper pilot scheme for carbon capture devices. All those things could be explored in a pure way and then, in the way that often happens after pure research, industry could look at what could be used and the way we are investing at the moment.

  [Source]

• 9 Feb 2017: Smart Metering: Electricity and Gas

  14:09

  Written evidence to the Committee said that the process the Government had used to get a cost of £12.1 billion and a net benefit of £4 billion was intellectual slosh, when compared to eight other international studies, and asked some fairly fundamental questions. Why, when Texas has 350 pages of regulations to cover its smart meter system, does our system have 7,000 pages? I have not only had the pleasure of taking part in the Science and Technology Committee’s report; I also sat on the Select Committee on Energy and Climate Change with the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead). We asked just how many pages there were on the SMETS 2 meters, and it was a huge number of pages. One has to ask why there is no comparison. Why is it that in Italy and Spain the individual cost of meters is about half the price that they are in this country? The hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran pointed to one of the reasons. There are 11 objectives and in anything with 11 objectives, things will get lost.

  There is a great deal to be worried about, including the background, the assessments and the principles. The incompatibility between the SMETS 1 and SMETS 2 systems, which has also already been referred to, is a real problem that is yet to be solved. An even bigger problem is that when Ministers were asked by the Energy and Climate Change Committee—my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test may well have asked the question—what will keep the costs of the project down, because the Government have no control over that, the answer was “competition”. When British Gas are the near-monopoly supplier of the meters, that is not good enough.

  [Source]

• 30 Jun 2015: Shale Gas

  10:10

  In the time available, I will make two major points. The first is that this country is at a particularly critical moment in its economic history. The energy policy that we have had for the past seven or eight years—putting up the price of energy by moving to intermittent renewable sources, which has increased people’s bills—has had two unfortunate consequences: not only the price going up, but the deindustrialisation of the country, as industry has moved elsewhere in the world. As a result, although the policy objective is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the overall carbon footprint of the country has increased. The policy has been a mistake. We now have a big decision to make on runway capacity in the south-east—which I will not talk about, Mr Howarth—as well as on fracking. All those decisions are critical for our country’s future wealth.

  [Source]

• 20 Nov 2014: IPCC Fifth Assessment Report

  13:51

  It is worth understanding what is meant when we talk about the scientific basis for climate change. Essentially, if the climate is changing, it is because the energy budget of this planet is altering. We are taking in more energy than we are radiating as a planet. There is no direct way of measuring that process, so we have to look at indirect measurement, which leads us into a number of difficulties. One only has to think about the ice ages to realise that the climate has always changed. There is natural variation, and if the planet is taking in more energy than it is radiating, that will inevitably lead to climate change that is not a natural variation.

  As Professor Trewavas has said, there is not a scientist on the planet who can measure and distinguish between natural climate variation and anthropogenic climate variation, so we are in serious difficulty when we talk about the scientific basis of climate change. That has become an area of great controversy and enthusiasm from certain parties. I am—or at least I was—a scientist. As I have debated science in this place and elsewhere, I have come to the conclusion that science and politics are a bad mix, and that one tends to contaminate the other. Science is about the search for truth. Good scientists, if they are proved wrong, will shout, “Alleluia!” because they are pleased that the boundaries of knowledge have been pushed further. Politics is about winning the argument; it is about my side beating the other side.

  Unfortunately, in the debate around climate change, some politicians and so-called non-governmental organisations have distorted the science and pushed arguments in a non-scientific way. A current example of that—it is not immediately to do with climate change although it could be—is the case of Professor Anne Glover, the former scientific adviser to the President of the European Commission. She has just failed to get her contract renewed because she took a view on genetically modified foods that Greenpeace and other groups did not like, and those groups lobbied to remove scientific advice from the Commission.

  I think we will see that various activist groups have behaved in a similar way in the discussion about climate change. Because of that, I proposed a number of amendments to the Energy and Climate Change Committee report, which fell into three categories. The first was about the political nature of the report that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change produced. The second was about what passes for science, given the problem I talked about before of direct measurement of the planet’s energy balance and climate change. The third was about the consequences for this country’s energy policy.

  Staying with the science for a moment, one of the amendments that I proposed to the Select Committee report was to say that we do not really have 97% consensus that we are heading towards catastrophic climate change. I base that, although there are other areas that we can look at, on Robin Guenier’s evidence to the Committee. He carried out a survey of all the reports that consider the views of climate scientists, and he concluded:

  The regularly cited figure of 97% consensus comes from a report by Cook based on an old survey of about 12,000 pieces of scientific literature. Cook looked at the literature, and if a scientist stated that they believed carbon dioxide to be a greenhouse gas, he claimed the paper in support of the consensus that catastrophic global warming is happening, which is a non sequitur—it clearly is not the case. When we look at the other papers surveyed by Guenier, which I can list if necessary, there are various views from different scientists and groups of scientists. No survey can be absolutely categorical about the views of climate scientists, but when those views are assessed, they certainly do not come out anywhere near 97% consensus that catastrophic global warming or climate change is happening. We can put that to one side.

  [Source]

• 23 Oct 2014: Communicating Climate Science

  13:53

  Every witness was asked for their definition of climate change and the answers were interesting. The Committee concluded that the best definitions of climate change were given by Professor Slingo of Reading university and the Met Office and Professor Rapley. Basically, they talked about the energy imbalance in the earth and the disruption to the climate. We thought they gave good definitions.

  We would have expected the Department to have a definition that the Minister understood, or at least had one at its finger tips. I am pleased to see the new Minister in her place, but I have to say that one of the crassest statements I have ever heard from a Minister at a Select Committee—I have served on many Select Committees over the past 17 years—was when the previous Minister of State was asked for his definition of climate change. He said:

  “Climate change is climate change.”

  “Climate change is a change in climate.”

  “However, we also note that the term ‘climate change’ does not apply just to the physical manifestation of a changing climate, but also actions to address human influence on the climate.”

  “For example, the scientific definition of ‘climate change’ based on Professors Slingo’s and Rapley’s definition does not explain the use of ‘climate change’ in the acronym ‘DECC’. In this case ‘climate change’ means not just the physical manifestation but also steps taken in the UK and internationally to reduce”

  greenhouse gas emissions

  The first thing the Government should do if they want to communicate effectively on what climate change is and what they mean by it is to agree on a definition and what action is required. The Government do not agree and give the definition of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but they want to extend that as well. That is an unsatisfactory position for any Government and it is not surprising that climate science and climate change is not communicated effectively if Ministers, scientific advisers and the Department do not agree on the same words.

  One statement is that there is consensus on climate science and climate change. That is sometimes used to close down debate. The Science Media Centre said:

  “Climate change is real and man made.”

  We heard that in a number of forms throughout the Committee’s hearings. A previous Minister said that the consensus is now beyond debate and that the BBC should not be interviewing people who do not accept it. It is worth looking at the consensus and at what it means. I will quote evidence that was given not to our Committee, but to the Select Committee on Energy and Climate Change.

  Basically, Guenier’s view was that anyone who believes that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and has some influence is part of that consensus. That is not really where the argument is. He then moves on to two other studies, discounting the statistic of 97% and looking at a survey by the American Meteorological Society. It is worth quoting from that because, again, the previous Minister did not like it. It states:

  Therefore, the debate on this issue relies on a belief that 97% of scientists believe there will be some climate catastrophe because of extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The evidence from scientific literature does not support that 97%.

  “There are disputes in the scientific community. We have to have an open attitude to the scientific research. There’s an alternative view that climate change is caused by cyclical trends in nature itself. We have to keep an open attitude.”

  He is not an obscure scientist. When people say there is consensus that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and has an impact on the climate, the evidence does not extend to the belief that carbon dioxide will do major damage to the planet.

  Last week, Steven E. Koonin—again, he is not an obscure scientist, but was the Under Secretary of Energy for Science, in the United States Department of Energy, and one of Obama’s senior scientific advisers—made a statement. By profession, he is a computational physicist. He clearly makes the point that there is consensus that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, but the real question he believes should be answered is:

  “How will the climate change over the next century under both natural and human influence?”

  The models cannot, by and large, reproduce the current situation and they imperfectly represent the past. There are huge, detailed differences between the 55 models that the IPCC uses. Rather than looking across the piece and seeing whether there is a consensus among scientists on the big issue—which there is not—if we look in detail at the modellers who are at the core of the climate change debate, we find that because they make different adjustments in their models, there is no consensus there either, and there are often huge differences in their predictions.

  Because the BBC is criticised from both sides, it has made real efforts to improve its coverage of climate science and climate change, but I am not convinced that it has got it right. It asked for a report from Professor Steve Jones, who is a well respected professor of genetics—I am slightly in awe of Professor Jones when it comes to genetics; I have read his books, and he is a brilliant man and a good communicator.

  However, to go back to the debate that my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston was having about whether climate scientists should be the people to talk about climate science on the BBC, Professor Jones was an odd person to choose to advise the BBC on climate science. We had a private meeting with him—which was interesting, because I was a bit star-struck on meeting him—and I did not think his answers were really adequate, because he was looking at secondary and tertiary phenomena. He seemed to think the fact that the Thames gate had been raised more times than was predicted was in some way evidence that global warming and climate change was happening, and I do not think it is. Rather, it is evidence that the gate has had to be raised a number of times. One of the interesting facts about climate change is that, with all the extra carbon dioxide that has been put into the atmosphere, the rise in sea level, which is about a foot a century, has continued at almost exactly the same rate.

  It is true that the media, as I said at the beginning, tend to be ignorant of science, and I cannot leave this subject without giving two examples. One is slightly old. “The World This Weekend”, a few years ago, put the tsunami in Thailand down to climate change, which would be a surprise to most scientists and geologists. A few weeks ago, The Times , in one of its editorials, declared carbon dioxide to be a pollutant. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Without carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we would all be dead. Plants need carbon dioxide; we need plants—end of story. It is not a pollutant. The amount in the atmosphere goes up and down. That just indicates how bereft of scientific training many journalists are.

  I want to finish with two points. This is a serious debate. It is disappointing that so few hon. Members are present. A great deal of Government expenditure is based on a belief that there will be catastrophic climate change. The evidence for that is very limited. All energy policies should include the following. Security of energy supply, so that the lights do not go out, is the top priority. Cost to the consumer, both industry and the individual, is the second priority; and the third priority is how much carbon dioxide and pollutants are being put into the atmosphere.

  There is that kind of vilification on one side and there is the vilification of Lord Lawson, who is not of my political party. He has tried to enhance the debate, particularly on the policy side. He has said—I would not go quite this far with him—“Accept that climate change is happening as people say. What is the right policy response?” I think he has enhanced that debate, but, again, he comes in for a great deal of vilification from the other side. If we are to understand the science better and to get better policies than we have at the moment, that nastiness, which should not be part of any political discussion and certainly any scientific discussion, should cease.

  [Source]

• 7 Nov 2013: Energy Prices, Profits and Poverty

  14:17

  The example I gave at the beginning of my speech is an extreme one, but it is a strange policy that decides to invest in energy sources that provide guaranteed income for the generators at three times the current market rate for energy, as is the case with offshore wind farms. As has been said, the reason is fear of climate change and induced global warming because of the increased production of carbon dioxide. We could have a long debate about that, but I do not intend to go into it now.

  The fact that our carbon footprint is increasing is not often mentioned, and some Ministers do not seem to understand anything about the issue. When the Minister, the right hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker), was asked to define climate change, he gave the useless definition that climate change was climate change. He repeated that twice. When a Minister of State has that level of understanding, it is not surprising that we do not have useful policies.

  The other basis of the policy is that the people in the Department of Energy and Climate Change know that the price of fossil fuels will rise over the next 10 or 15 years. If they could predict the market, I suspect they would not be working in the Department because they would all be rich. The fact is that there is a super-abundance of fossil fuels in the world; there are trillions of cubic metres of shale gas in this country and sufficient coal to supply the world for hundreds of years. That is not the problem, although there are constraints on supply at particular times.

  [Source]

• 10 Sep 2013: Climate Change Act

  15:36

  First, is the Act working in its own terms? I often think that that is the best way to approach arguments—not to start with one’s own premises, but to consider those of the opposition. The Act is supposed to be bringing down carbon dioxide. Is it doing that, or helping to do it? The facts are that since 1990, instead of producing an extra two parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere per year, we are producing three. In Europe, the production of carbon dioxide since 1990 is down by 15%, but consumption is up by 19%, so in fact more carbon dioxide is being put into the atmosphere as the result of activity in the European Union. To put the matter at its simplest, if there is a carbon tax in Europe—if we charge for carbon—and not in China or India or elsewhere in the world, we are giving those countries an export subsidy. If that were to be put down as a straightforward argument, or motion, in the House of Commons, no one would support it. To put things another way, the policy is one of deindustrialisation, as the hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson) said.

  [Source]

• 18 Jul 2013: UK Shale Gas

  15:09

  I want now to move on to the science and to speak as a scientist. I agree with virtually everything the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley) said, apart from when he completely accepted what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said. We must remember that it involves a political process, which lies on top of a number of scientific papers; its work is not necessarily put together by scientists themselves.

  The hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion could be accused of being unrealistically precise in her comments about what is likely to happen in the climate over the coming years, and I would make two simple points about the science. First, I have talked to most of the leading scientists on climate change in this country and in the United States, and there is no known way of distinguishing natural variations in the climate from impacts caused by carbon dioxide—nobody knows how to do that.

  Secondly, the models that have been used to predict the increase in temperatures have all been wrong. In the Met Office, we have the biggest supercomputers in the world, which are great at back-projecting climate, but their projections of climate into the future have all been inaccurate. That is just an indication that there is something unknown about the science, which is not to say that carbon dioxide is not a greenhouse gas, because it clearly is, and it has been known as such for a long time. However, an artificial precision is being introduced into the debate, and it really should not be there. We do not, therefore, often talk about the science.

  The Government’s energy policy is based on taking a long-term position on the price of gas and oil—fossil fuels. Essentially, they are betting the house, the country or hundreds of billions of pounds that the price of fossil fuel will continue to rise. If that happens, and if renewables are put in place, they are likely to win their bet—and it is a bet. They will have to find the capital to fund those renewable energy supplies, but given that prices of publicly quoted shares in the European renewables market have dropped below their level in 2004-05, that looks very unlikely. If the Government lose their bet, our constituents will pay more for their energy than they should.

  Finally, I want to put the Government’s energy policy, which is not coherent, in the context of what is happening on emissions worldwide. Much of the Government’s policy is based on reducing emissions, in the belief that that will bring down global warming and slow down or stop climate change. However, the policy is failing, and emissions are going up. With emissions, one has to deal with imported goods, which are often created using industrial processes that create more carbon dioxide than processes here do. If we push up the price of energy here, we will export production to China, India and other places and increase the amount of carbon dioxide. That is a deindustrialisation policy, and I hope that, by exploiting shale gas in a safe and environmentally responsible way, we can start reindustrialising this country and creating the 72,000 jobs or more that it has been predicted will come from exploiting shale gas.

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• 12 Jul 2012: Oral Answers to Questions

  T7. The Minister failed to answer the question earlier about when shale gas would come on line, yet this source of energy would create real jobs and partially decarbonise the energy industry as well as lowering fuel bills. Why does he not get a move on? ( 116530 )

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• 25 Apr 2012: Civil Aviation Bill

  16:45

  I can assure the hon. Gentleman that the Government’s policy on airport capacity is not driven by tails or dogs or anything like that. It is driven by an understanding of the importance of ensuring that aviation has the space to grow, but also that it does so within parameters that address the local impacts of aviation, such as aircraft noise and air quality, which, as I am sure the hon. Gentleman will agree, can be corrosive. We also need aviation to play its part in our efforts to tackle climate change. Our approach is, and always will be, based on a sound and sensible assessment of the evidence on how best to have a growing aviation industry that also plays its part in addressing its environmental impacts.

  Those arguing against increasing airport capacity often say that that will help in our commitments to reducing carbon dioxide emissions. As we demonstrated in Committee however, that is not the case, because as a result passengers on intercontinental journeys often have to fly via other countries, so they have to take off twice, which produces extra pollution and extra carbon dioxide.

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• 20 Feb 2012: Future of Biomass

  22:15

  I was drawn to the opinion of the European Environment Agency scientific committee on greenhouse gas accounting that was published on 15 September 2011, a copy of which I have submitted to the Minister’s officials. It knocks on the head the assumption that biomass combustion is always inherently carbon neutral, and points to the “double counting” that causes that error. The report explains that the assumption

  On that basis, it urges that European Union regulations and policy targets should be revised to allow bioenergy use only from additional biomass that reduces net greenhouse gas emissions without displacing other necessities such as the production of food and fibre. It advises that accounting standards should fully reflect all changes in the amount of carbon stored by ecosystem, and that energy production from biomass should be based on by-products, wastes and residues rather than on stem wood that would otherwise continue happily to grow as forest biomass.

  I think that biomass deserves a place in the renewable energy mix of the future, but we need to get the rules of the game straight in advance, so that society is not left picking up the pieces of an impetuous policy.

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• 17 Nov 2010: Energy Efficiency Measures

  16:09

  Decarbonisation policies and renewable energy policies, both nationally and internationally, may not be in crisis but they are at a turning point. The Chicago climate exchange ended carbon trading, and a year ago the Copenhagen summit was not a success. Wind farms are increasingly criticised as an environmental blight as well as extremely expensive, and it has been noted that energy companies make three times as much money from wind farms as they do from coal and oil. The debate takes place in that context.

  The 2009 European directive on renewable energy excludes low-performing heat pumps from making a contribution to renewable energy targets. It states that

  From other data, we can deduce that that the EU implicitly requires heat pumps to achieve a COP of 2.875 before their energy contributes to the renewable energy target. The logic behind the EU requirement for a minimum efficiency level is that replacing a fossil-fuel heating system with a poorly performing heat pump may result in increased CO 2 emissions. That is because the emissions costs in the extra electricity requirement of a heat pump need to be balanced against the emissions of burning a fossil fuel.

  In response to a parliamentary question, the Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change, the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker), confirmed that

  The key point is that the nominal or certified design of coefficient of performance of a heat pump can differ radically from the efficiency after installation; so radically, in fact, that it can detract from rather than add to our battle against climate change. The Department of Energy and Climate Change is to subsidise heat pumps with taxpayers’ money at 5.5p per kWh for 20 years. That is an enormous amount of money committed for a long period, and we must be absolutely certain that taxpayers’ money subsidises only that which is renewable after installation and that which is good, rather than inefficient, not renewable and bad.

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• 24 Mar 2010: Fossil Fuels

  To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change what recent estimate he has made of the levies on fossil fuels necessary to fund the Renewable Heat Incentive in each of the next five years. ( 321461 )

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• 22 Mar 2010: Boilers: Carbon Emissions

  To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change what the efficiency ratings are in respect of the Standard Assessment Procedure for the calculation of carbon emissions of domestic boilers using B30K oil. ( 322830 )

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• 22 Mar 2010: Guanidine

  To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change what assessment he has made of the potential contribution of guanidine to his Department's renewable energy strategy. ( 323017 )

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• 16 Mar 2010: Energy: Billing

  To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change what estimate he has made of the effect on domestic fuel bills of the Renewable Heat Incentive in each of the next five years. ( 321462 )

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• 12 Mar 2010: Biofuels

  To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change what his policy is on the use of imported biomass from areas at risk of (a) degradation of natural or semi-natural ecosystems or habitats, (b) indirect land use change and (c) net biodiversity loss. ( 321487 )

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• 12 Mar 2010: Food: Prices

  To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change what assessment he has made of the effect on UK food prices of his Department’s biomass strategy. ( 321463 )

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• 4 Mar 2010: Biofuels

  To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change what recent estimate he has made of the annual requirement for biomass for burning in (a) power stations and (b) for renewable heat; and what proportion of that requirement (i) is currently imported and (ii) will be imported in each of the next five years. ( 320002 )

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• 3 Mar 2010: Air Pollution

  To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs which areas of the country he expects to be compliant with EU limits on ambient air concentrations of particulates and nitrogen oxide at the conclusion of the term of the renewable energy strategy. ( 320001 )

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• 8 Feb 2010: Wind Power

  To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change what the total output was of the UK's wind turbines connected to the national grid as a percentage of their load factor in each week in January 2010. ( 316234 )

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• 7 Jan 2010: Biofuels

  To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change what progress his Department has made in defining its biomass sustainability criteria. ( 308252 )

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• 7 Jan 2010: Boilers

  To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change whether the boiler scrappage scheme applies to boilers operating on liquefied petroleum gas. ( 308251 )

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See all Parliamentary Speeches Mentioning Climate