16:24 Barry Gardiner (Labour)

I address my remarks to the Minister in particular, as this is an area in which the Government need to do more. The Government now have a strong link and positive engagement with India, and they need to step up to the mark in the same way in China, reinforcing their commitment there. That would prove tremendously positive, not just for climate change and climate change negotiations, but for our own productive economy, including our exports.

The International Energy Agency estimates that China will account for half the growth in energy-related emissions to 2030. For almost a decade, that is the sort of fact that has been used to vilify China, painting it as the villain of the piece, and politicians have sometimes used it as an excuse for inaction. Indeed, the fact that China produces so many emissions is one of the most trenchant arguments used, as we heard earlier, in the US Senate for taking no action on climate change. The Chinese economy will, of course, remain one of the most powerful engines of climate change for the next two decades, but at the same time the scale of its own ambition for decarbonisation will, I think, be a turning point in global efforts to halt the pace of climate change. China’s approach, although much of it based on domestic political reasons, because of the problems with pollution in its own cities, is driving China to take really positive steps to increase not the decarbonisation but the carbon productivity of its economy, at the same time as making great advances on renewables.

In October 2011, Minister Xie came to London as part of a delegation hosted by GLOBE. He met senior political figures from all three major UK parties—including Cabinet Office Ministers, the then Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change and the Leader of the Opposition—as well as senior Members of the European Parliament, and it was agreed that a regular second track to negotiations should be established.

In Venice in September 2012, that second track took off when the Chinese delegation—led by Su Wei, the director general of the Department of Climate Change in the National Development and Reform Commission—agreed the approach now being carried forward by China and GLOBE in Europe. As we speak, the unlikely team of Lord Prescott and Lord Deben is in China with a delegation of legislators from France and other parts of Europe to negotiate with the Chinese on an initiative about how the UK and China can work together to reduce carbon emissions through product standards.

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16:31 Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)

“China is central to global efforts to tackle climate change”—

“and should be at the heart of HMG’s climate change mitigation strategy.”

“Slowing the pace of decarbonisation at home could undermine…the credibility of UK leadership on climate change.”

The second delusion is about China’s decarbonisation policy. The British intelligentsia has always been capable of convincing itself that China is a paragon of whatever is the current fashionable virtue. When I was at Cambridge, Professor Joan Robinson used to dress in a Mao suit and teach us that China had shown us a new economic model that we could all follow. Now it is doing the same on climate change. The report states:

“China has set out some of the most ambitious decarbonisation plans in the world.”

Half that growth will come from the country that is pursuing the most ambitious decarbonisation policy in the world, and by 2030

I submit that those two views are incompatible. Either China is pursuing the most ambitious decarbonisation policy in the world, in which case one assumes that it will decarbonise—or at least match our skills in reducing, or preventing the growth in, carbon emissions—or it will not.

In 2011, the increase in emissions from China exceeded the UK’s total emissions by 200 million tonnes. The device used in the report to convince us all that the Chinese are pursuing an ambitious decarbonisation policy is, first, to glide from talking about reducing emissions to talking about reducing emissions growth, which is not quite the same thing, and, secondly, to equate reduction in carbon intensity with cutting carbon emissions, which is not the same thing at all.

The third delusion is the prospect of green jobs in the UK resulting from exports to China. That prospect depends on the UK inflicting on itself severe and ambitious measures to decarbonise the UK economy. The report states:

“Slowing the pace of decarbonisation at home could undermine our low-carbon businesses and the export opportunities for this sector”.

My right hon. Friend must take great credit for the fact that he presided over one of the largest single factors in Britain’s being able to meet its decarbonising targets, because he was in the Government during the dash for gas, and I would say that the single biggest factor that we could hope for in shifting China from its current carbon intensity is to shift it off coal and on to more gas. That would have a transformational impact in the way that the Government of which he was such an important part did here in the UK in the ’90s— [Interruption.] And it is a green export.

In following the previous Chairman’s admonition to us to keep interventions short, I have cut short the Minister’s intervention. The suggestion that we need to pursue at home policies to decarbonise our industry, in order to persuade the Chinese to use our expertise in oil and gas, defies all logic and I find it completely breathtaking. The argument seems to be that if we are to get these green jobs—the Minister has now reclassified exporting oil and gas expertise as a green job—we have to discourage the use of oil and gas at home. The mind boggles. The sheer, passionate desire of the Minister and, I am afraid, of some members of the Committee, not to face up to reality but to come up with every kind of spurious defence for a policy that simply does not hold water baffles me.

The truth is that we are, by imposing on our business high energy costs in the UK, driving business abroad, some of it to China. By subsidising the investment in solar panels and wind turbines, we are creating opportunities for China to export to the UK and we are probably creating green jobs in China. But let us not pretend that we are creating any green jobs for ourselves, or any opportunities to export to China, that would not exist if we simply abandoned all our climate change commitments in this country.

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16:44 Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)

The Select Committee report is not about whether Britain has an imperialistic relationship with China and wishes to influence the whole of Chinese development. It is a modest effort to look at how the UK’s climate change and energy considerations might be attached to relations with the largest emitter of CO 2 in the world. I am talking about a country that is developing rapidly economically, and changing equally rapidly its position as regards its stance on climate change. The report tried to consider how those two things might be matched. Unless we do not believe that there is any merit whatever in having any sort of international dialogue with anybody, we should take that Select Committee view at face value and welcome it for what it is.

The report is not a view that all is rosy in the world of China, but a timely reminder that China is changing its view on climate change. A number of things are happening in China that underline that view. Indeed, just yesterday, the Minister in charge of climate policies, Xie Zhenhua, indicated that the aim for the Chinese economy now is a reduction in the 2011 levels of carbon intensity by 40% to 45% by 2020. It also wants to boost its non-fossil fuel use to 15% of energy consumption by 2020. He talked about the beginning of the carbon market in Shenzhen in June and then later in the year in Shanghai. Significantly, he said that instruments will be included in the Shanghai carbon trading market that will take credits off the market when supplies are too high and prices are too low. He said that China would learn from the difficulties that are taking place in Europe and that it was committed to the development of a carbon trading market. In the 11th five-year plan, China had attempted to reach some targets. Among other things, it closed down factories for a number of weeks towards the end of the five-year period for each region to reach its target.

Whatever we may think about elements of the political and economic situation in China and how they are dealt with, it is worth while collaborating with China to a far greater extent for the greater good, not only of China or this country but of the wider world. If the Committee’s report has been able to emphasise and underpin that process, it has achieved a good purpose. However, hon. Members should not read into the report something that is not there. It is an honest attempt to consider how UK advances and UK positions may be aligned more closely with other countries and with China in particular. China is indeed changing its stance on climate change—it is not a delusion to say that—and for its own purposes, as well as for international purposes, beginning to make substantial changes in how it goes about its economic activity, and it is important that we do likewise—

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16:50 Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)

As many hon. Members have noted in their contributions, China is key to the fight against climate change. China’s carbon emissions have risen rapidly during the past decade; they are up by more than 171% since 2000, growing to be 48% larger than the USA’s output of carbon emissions. As China is now responsible for 29% of the world’s carbon emissions and, on current trajectories, is predicted to become responsible for 50% of global emissions by 2030, it is clear that no effort to tackle climate change will be successful without its engagement. Therefore, as the Chairman of the Committee alluded to, it is welcome that China’s latest five-year plan is the greenest yet.

“The UK’s image is unfortunately in danger of becoming tarnished by a reputation of being more talk than action when it comes to climate change.”

We know from independent analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance that investment in renewable energy has fallen by half since this Government came to power, and figures published in November 2012 by Ernst and Young on attractiveness for investment in renewable energy showed that the UK has fallen to sixth place, slipping below France, which, as has been pointed out in the two debates this afternoon, is a country that generates nearly 80% of its electricity from nuclear.

In the earlier debate, I spoke about the incredible frustration that is felt about the fact that the Government are refusing to include an explicit commitment in the Energy Bill to decarbonise our power sector by 2030 that would provide businesses with the certainty and confidence in the Government’s green agenda that they are crying out for. That reluctance to commit resources and support at home is, as the report identifies, damaging our reputation abroad. The report notes:

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16:57 The Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Gregory Barker)

This has been a much shorter debate than the previous one. Nevertheless, it has been extremely useful and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk (Mr Yeo) and the rest of the Energy and Climate Change Committee for producing this important report, following the Committee’s inquiry on co-operation with China on low-carbon development.

I get positive feedback when I engage with members of the Chinese Government, as I did last week in Washington, when I had a good conversation with some of those people, who appreciate the role that we play. As the Committee’s report observed, China is central to global efforts to tackle climate change. The challenge is huge. We believe that, working with our Chinese colleagues, we can accelerate both our own and their transition to a low-carbon growth pattern, however modestly.

The Committee, like hon. Members in the debate, recognises the importance of carbon capture and storage as a technology that is critical to meeting our climate change goals, particularly in the longer term. Although the technology faces significant challenges in China around cost and energy penalties, there are encouraging signs that China may be taking a more proactive stance. For example, the Ministry of Science and Technology has recently issued its 12th five-year plan, which lays out its priorities for research, development and demonstration of CCS use and storage. The UK will continue to share its experience with China and to use our influential climate financing to advance that agenda, given how critical it is for the delivery of our climate change objectives.

The International Climate Fund is giving £35 million to support an Asian Development Bank programme, developing CCS in countries including China. In addition, Research Councils UK has put £3 million of co-funding into joint CCS research, and a Foreign and Commonwealth Office-funded study stimulating interest in taking forward CCS in the Guangdong region may result in new offshore demonstration programmes. We will not fund those programmes or projects, but we must not undervalue the long-term commercial benefit of being associated with their early development. That is a sensible use of taxpayers’ seedcorn in a global industry that could, in a very few years, be worth billions of pounds and where the UK will be seen to have a leadership role.

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