[John Bercow in the Chair] — Personal Carbon Trading

Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 3:09 pm on 18 June 2009.

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Photo of Colin Challen Colin Challen Labour, Morley and Rothwell 3:09, 18 June 2009

Like others, I want to express my best wishes to you for Monday, Mr. Bercow. I certainly hope—I will be quite blunt—that you are successful.

I congratulate our Chairman, Mr. Yeo, on his comprehensive analysis of our report and the Government's response. I will do my best not to repeat any of the points that he made, although they are eminently repeatable. I look forward to 3 June 2010, which is the last possible date for a general election, because his constituents will have had the chance by then to analyse the consequences of his pilot programme. I will be waiting to see whether he wins a seventh endorsement for his stance.

Today is important because we have seen the publication of the climate change projections report, which I have here. It is also 20 days short of the fifth anniversary of the publication of my Domestic Tradable Quotas (Carbon Emissions) Bill, which dealt with personal carbon allowances and tradable energy quotas. I am pleased to be able to acknowledge the presence in the Public Gallery of David Fleming, who had a great hand in developing those ideas. It has been a long process. When I launched my ten-minute Bill, I thought that it might take the Government five years to take the idea seriously, but here we are, 20 days short of five years, and they are still not taking it seriously. They did for a while, but then the enthusiasm slipped away in a sea of timidity and out of a fear of the possible electoral consequences. The pilot project would therefore be welcome.

I will refer to this later, but I have just put in a Presentation Bill to put climate change health warnings on car advertising, in the same way that we put health warnings on tobacco. The aim is to influence people's behaviour and to promote a better understanding of carbon in people's lives and consumption. Why can advertisers use six or eight-point type to bury details about the amount of carbon that their products emit? Many of them—unless they are particularly proud of their cars' green credentials—provide no explanation. We must start educating people, and that is where the Government need to do a lot more work.

We should look at the projections in today's report to remind ourselves how precarious the situation is. One of the tables, which is taken from the intergovernmental panel on climate change's fourth assessment report of 2008, shows that, on a high-emissions scenario, we will be heading for a 5.5 or 6° C increase. On a medium scenario, it will be 4° C. On a low scenario, it will be just under 3° C. Of course, we want to get to no more than 2° C, which, according to the IPCC, will require far more effort than will be needed to achieve the lowest of its emissions scenarios. That is a tremendous amount of effort, and the evidence from the negotiations, which took place in Bonn a few days ago, and which will continue up to Copenhagen, is that we will not get there—we will not reach the black line on the graph in today's report.

The evidence that the Committee gathered in Washington a few weeks ago suggests that the American targets will be weakened to get a Bill through Congress. In fact, the target for emissions cuts by 2020—the all-important interim target—has come down from 20 to 17 per cent. A lot of people may not realise that that target is based on a 2005 baseline, not the 1990 baseline that our targets are based on. The American targets will include different sectors from ours, but ambition of even the most ambitious Bill that has a chance of success in Congress is well below current European objectives.

The signals from Bonn over the past few days are that the developing world is extremely unhappy about the extra commitment that we say we will make. We must make greater commitments, and they should go well beyond even what our carbon budgets say should happen. We need a successful and sufficient agreement, and the word "sufficient" is more important than the word "successful", which can be a political minefield. If the agreement is sufficient, the EU and the UK will increase their targets according to the Climate Change Committee's recommendations, but that is still a long way off. The science is saying that things are serious, but the political situation is even more dire.

We also have to look at the UK contribution. Most people say—Ministers often say this—that the UK is responsible for 2 per cent. of global emissions, which is true. Last year, however, the pocket environment guide produced by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs—I would recommend it as holiday reading to anybody going on their holidays, although not, of course, by air—showed that emissions related to UK consumption accounted for well above 15 per cent. of the global total. If we think about it, how could we claim to be the fifth or sixth biggest economy in the world with only 2 per cent. of greenhouse gas emissions? That simply does not stack up.

That raises an important question about responsibility. We have to put it to people that their consumption is at the root of the problem—the problem does not start somewhere else. A Chinese coal-fired power station is part of a supply chain. I was thinking about this problem on the way back from last year's climate change camp at Kingsnorth, which I visited with one or two other hon. Members. E.ON wants to build a new power station—originally, it wanted to build it without carbon capture and storage—so it becomes the enemy and the target of a great deal of campaigning. As I went back through the suburbs of east London on the train, however, I thought, "Here's the real target. It's all those kettles that get switched on. It's those big flat-screen TVs." When we campaign against climate change, our focus is on the big power producers, and there is a lot of credit in that approach, but the simple fact is that we tend to forget that it is individuals who demand electricity and the other forms of energy that they need for a comfortable lifestyle.

We have to address those people. If we do not, the power stations will still be built, including many of those in China, which produce the energy needed to make our cheap goods. Those Chinese power stations will continue to be built without CCS and will continue to create a problem. The Chinese are now using this issue as an argument. They say, "Why should we have to take the whole bitter pill when you lot created the problem and your consumption feeds our growth?" That is a powerful argument, and one which we would begin to address if we introduced personal carbon trading.

It has been said that such a scheme is very complex, but I simply do not believe that. If the people who invented supermarket reward cards had had somebody whispering in their ears, "It's a complex scheme. Don't do it," we would not have Nectar cards at Sainsbury or Clubcards at Tesco. The carbon allowances scheme would be relatively simple, and it would be extremely condescending to say that a lot of people could not understand it. Indeed, it would be extremely simple; in some cases, people would not even be terribly conscious of it, because much of the hard work would be done by the utilities' computers.

Let us compare the scheme with what we have now. I hope that nobody would argue that what we have now is simple and something that the public can understand. I would like to do a straw poll in Parliament square to see whether people understand the emissions trading scheme or know how much it saved last year in terms of carbon emissions. I would like to ask them what the renewables obligation and carbon emissions reduction targets are. The Government are creating more and more measures to deal with climate change, and I welcome them in so far as they go, but they are not sufficient and they do not address the real problem of our consumer society and our pursuit of greater gross domestic product per capita, which is, of course, expressed in terms of growth. There is a serious question to ask about whether the scheme would be more or less complex than all our upstream schemes, which are opaque, remote and mean nothing to the public.

If people knew what these things were—if they read the Committee's reports more often, they probably would—they would know that the National Audit Office has suggested that the third phase of the EU ETS, including carbon trading, may deliver a domestic effort resulting in only a 7 per cent. reduction in carbon emissions. If people thought that they were paying all that extra in their bills just to get 7 per cent., they might be quite nonplussed. We have to be careful when we say that the scheme would be so complex that we could not possibly introduce it.

I have also sat for the past two and a half years on the Green Fiscal Commission, which looks at taxation issues. After two and half years I do not think that we are any closer to a simple way of addressing environmental taxation. That is a problem with taxation approaches: every time someone mentions the environment to a constituent, the next thought to pop into their head is "How much is that going to cost me?" The environment gets a bad name when everything that happens in connection to it is a new tax or a new cost.

We must go to the public and engage with them. We require a scheme that, as the Select Committee Chairman has said, is very progressive—the opposite of income tax and many other taxes. That would simplify our approach enormously. We now need to rest, permanently, the approach that has dominated the Government's thinking when they have gone directly to the public—the voluntary approach. We have a number of quite good educational tools, the most of important of which is the Act On CO2 website. Last June the Minister was pleased to announce that there had been more than 1 million hits on the site since it was launched in the previous year. I do not know whether that number has doubled. Perhaps the Minister will tell us, on the first anniversary of that announcement, that there have now been 2 million hits. Deeper analysis, however, suggests that only half the people who went to the website did the calculation of their footprint, and only half of those did anything about it. The voluntary approach that leads to 1.2 million hits in a year has led, according to the Government's analysis, to only 250,000 people doing something about it.