Written evidence to be reported to the House
Energy Bill
12:00 pm
Tom Burke: Is it better for us to burn fossil fuels? Provided that we can do that in a carbon-neutral way, absolutely. I think that I said that extremely clearly; to protect the security and prosperity of 60 million Britons, we have got to solve the coal problem, irrespective of what we do, because of what others will almost certainly do. Also, we are going to use coal, as has been demonstrated by the Kingsnorth application. Therefore, we need to show that we will walk our talk on climate change. We will need to move very rapidly to the mobility for ourselves and for everybody else to use coal in a carbon-neutral way. I think that that is technologically possible; I also think that it will be very expensive. There are some technological problems and other problems to solve, but they are all inside the bounds of our technical and economic competence to solve. I think that we should just get on with that.
I am not advocating using more energy of any kind. As others have said—I think most people would agree—improving energy efficiency is by far and away the fastest and cheapest way to guarantee both energy and climate security. So I was slightly trapped by the word that you were using there, “advocating”. I do not want to “advocate” more use of energy per se, but I want to advocate that we solve the coal problem first.
I am also somewhat sceptical of a rather interesting reversal, where we have an environmentalist arguing for the prioritisation and the business world arguing for “let’s do a bit of everything”. We usually get accused of wanting to do everything and not being willing to prioritise. I suspect that the idea that we can do a bit of everything will lead us into a situation where we do not get very much of anything done.