Schedule 6
Climate Change Bill [Lords]
4:00 pm
David Maclean (Penrith and The Border, Conservative)
May I say how relieved I am that my right hon. Friend has moved away from exhorting the Minister to be vulgar and is extolling the virtues of his mother’s good habits. The Committee will be on safer ground if we stick with the latter—not to mention the habits of any dustbin men. I rise generally to support, if not the amendment, the thrust of what has been said by my right hon. Friend and the hon. Member for Cheltenham. The Minister may say that the amendment is not necessary, because proposed new section 125A(2) of the Energy Act 2004, on page 75, already does what the amendment would do and that the Government intend to ensure that the administrator promotes only good biofuels.
A few years ago, I was one of those who thought that biofuels could do no wrong, but I was wrong to think that. I was perhaps looking at the issue from a Cumbrian or a United Kingdom perspective. I looked at the acres and acres of set-aside and at the weeds and thistles and thought, “Goodness me, why are we promoting that? I know that there’s a wildlife element involved, but can’t we grow biofuels there instead?” I was looking at the issue from the perspective of what we could do in our localities to grow indigenous British crops closer to home and convert them into biofuel, because I thought that was a better alternative to leaving land fallow or set aside. In those circumstances, there was a place for biofuels, and I called for more of them to be produced in Cumbria, so that we did not need to have a plague of ghastly wind farms, like a noose around the neck of the Lake district.
In the past few years, however, I have seen certain countries cut down their original, primal rain forests to grow sugar cane to convert into biofuels, and I therefore joined the school of thought that believes that biofuels can do no right. That, too, is wrong, and I suspect that the truth lies somewhere in between, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal said. It is utterly wrong to cut down original rain forests to grow short-term crops—sugar cane or date palms for palm oil—that are then converted into biofuels and transported hundreds of thousands of miles around the world.
Colleagues on both sides of the Committee will be relieved to know that I am not going down the old biodiversity and rain forest speech route again, but it is a million times better to keep rain forests intact and preserve our biodiversity than to cut them down for biofuels. It is better for our carbon footprint to let them grow ad infinitum and then to let them rot and grow afresh than it is to cut them down—that immediately releases carbon—than to grow short-term crops for biofuels that do nothing to reduce our carbon footprint.
All that I want from the Minister is an absolute assurance that, even if the Government will not accept the amendment, the administrator will take into account the thrust of what the hon. Member for Cheltenham and my right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal have said and will promote the supply of transport fuel using biofuels only if those biofuels have not been produced by destroying a better crop, such as primal rain forest or our upland bogs and peatlands, which have locked carbon in.
I have no objection to using biofuels if they are from short-term coppice or myriad other crops that I have never heard of and do not understand, if they come from close to home and if they do not involve a huge number of whatever the equivalent of food miles is—I suppose that the term would be fuel miles. Similarly, I have no objection to biofuels if we do not cause more destruction or release more carbon into the atmosphere to create the modern environment to grow short-term biofuel crops. That is not the way to go, and I look forward to the Minister’s assurance.