Greg Smith MP: Climate Timeline

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Greg Smith's Climate-related Tweets, Speeches & Votes

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

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• 30 Jan 2025: Parliamentary Speech

  When consumer confidence is low, business confidence is low, and nowhere is that more visible than in our automotive sector, with UK car production slumping to its lowest level since 1954. Autocar magazine warned today that the zero emission vehicle mandate

  Full debate: Business Confidence

• 30 Jan 2025: Parliamentary Speech

  When consumer confidence is low, business confidence is low, and nowhere is that more visible than in our automotive sector, with UK car production slumping to its lowest level since 1954. Autocar magazine warned today that the zero emission vehicle mandate

  Full debate: Oral Answers to Questions

• 24 Jan 2025: Parliamentary Speech

  To answer the hon. Gentleman’s serious point, I do not see anything in the Bill that challenges the zero emission vehicle mandate. The ZEV mandate is obsessed with testing at tailpipe rather than whole-system analysis, which gets in the way of developing synthetic fuels and greenlighting the great innovators in this country and worldwide to get on with developing that technology. If we put a synthetic fuel through an internal combustion engine, there is still carbon at tailpipe, but it is the same volume of carbon that will be recaptured through atmospheric carbon capture to make the next lot of fuel. It is carbon neutral. It is one volume of carbon in a perpetual circle, yet I see nothing in the Bill that will enable those great innovators to move ahead and get—as some of them claim they can—cost parity with the fossil fuel equivalent within a decade.

  I hear the point the hon. Lady makes, but I fundamentally disagree. We already have the direction—it was the last Conservative Government who were the first in the western world to legislate for net zero by 2050 and who passed the Environment Act. The answers to the challenges we face in the development of synthetics do not sit in the Bill before us today. They sit in other legislation, which I admit I voted against in the last Parliament, but it is the ZEV mandate that gets in the way, because it fails to look at whole-system analysis. Who else wants to have a go?

  Full debate: Climate and Nature Bill

• 9 Jan 2025: Parliamentary Speech

  Estimates suggest that the SAF mandate provisions and the revenue certainty mechanism will still leave a shortfall, with a family of four facing over £300 extra to fly on holiday by 2040. That is a clear concern for consumers, as well as the airline industry. Net zero should not come at an additional cost to consumers or undermine freedoms—in this case, the freedom to fly. The test must surely be how to defossilise, decarbonise and allow people to do the same at the same cost. What steps is the Minister taking in conjunction with the Treasury to close the financial gap between incentives in the mandate and the actual increased cost of switching to SAF for the end consumer?

  Full debate: Oral Answers to Questions

• 11 Nov 2024: Parliamentary Speech

  Of course, that was not the only threat to British farming in the Budget. There was the attack on basic equipment such as pick-up trucks, whereby farmers face paying an extra £5,000 simply for having the audacity to want back seats for their children. Then there is the carbon tax, which will see the cost of fertiliser rise by between £50 and £75 a tonne, which will have a detrimental impact on either farmers’ margins or food prices, or potentially both. Across the country, either outcome would be devastating.

  Full debate: Rural Affairs

• 4 Nov 2024: Parliamentary Speech

  The APR changes are not the only changes that will hammer our farming families and agricultural communities. I am sure there is a joke somewhere along the lines of “When is a pick-up truck not a pick-up truck?”, but it is no laughing matter for farmers. For them, it is just a basic bit of equipment that they need to operate, but this Government are hammering them on the cost of that equipment if it happens to have rear seats. As I raised earlier today in this House during the urgent question, the Government’s carbon tax will put up the price of fertiliser by between £50 and £75 a tonne. Either that is going to have a direct impact on the cost of food, or the Government are asking farmers—already operating on incredibly tight margins, often with no profit at all—just to swallow that extra cost. I urge them to reconsider.

  Full debate: Income Tax (Charge)

• 04 Nov 2024: Tweet

  My question to the Farming Minister earlier on the impact of carbon taxes on fertiliser prices - which will have only one of two consequences - farm bankruptcies or higher food prices. Labour just don’t get the realities of farming. https://x.com/gregsmith_uk/status/1853522926139507153/video/1 [Source]