ISIS Report 14/06/06
Parliament Launch of Which Energy?
ISIS Energy Report Gets Cross Party Support
Tim Yeo MP Shadow
Secretary of State for Public Services, Health and Education, and Chair of
cross-party Environmental Audit Committee, welcomes and praises ISIS
Energy Report
ISIS report leads the way
Welcome to the launch of the Which
Energy? report. It’s good to see so many of you here and I know
that a lot of you have come from quite far-flung places around the country
so I am grateful for the effort that you made.
This report is extremely stimulating and could hardly
be more timely. I agree with a great deal, although, I have to say, not all
of the views expressed in it. But I shall let other people debate that today.
My committee, The Environmental
Audit Committee (EAC) has also published its own report on most of the same
energy issues last month. The conclusions are available on the (EAC) website
and worth reading. It was an interesting exercise trying to reconcile the
polarised positions of the individual committee members. We produced a unanimous
report after only a moderate amount of agony and we managed to set up some
benchmarks by which the Governments own review can be judged and criteria
for how choices can be made in the drive for more low carbon electricity generation.
We’re all hanging on the
Governments own review. I’m not being partisan here, but I fear that the review
seems to have somewhat been pre-empted by the Prime Ministers speech to the
CBI (Confederation of British Industry) last week. There is cross party support
on that point, I reckon!
However, what everyone does
agree on is the importance of the topic. There can be no solution to threat
of Climate Change without big changes in the way we produce and consume energy.
No doubt about Climate Change
I first became interested in Climate Change in my second stint at the
Department of Environment (DOE) as a Minister of State in the early 1990s.
And, even then, I suspected that many scientists deliberately underplayed
both the scale and the urgency of the threat of Climate Change, for fear of
being mocked. They wanted to approach it cautiously because so many people
did not believe in the concept at that stage. Today, nobody disputes the fact
that climate is changing, and few doubt that the pace of change is much faster
than we previously believed. But what we have failed to do is to translate
that acceptance of the fact of Climate Change into the actions that will avert
the politically catastrophic consequences of Climate Change.
For example, only yesterday
the EAC took evidence from the aviation industry, in the context of our enquiry
as to how to reduce carbon emissions from transport. They confirmed that
they cannot foresee any time in the next half century when carbon emissions
from aviation transport will actually start to fall. In fact they have projected
a continuous rise of emissions over the next 50 years. No government in the
world that I have identified has yet recognised the need to act to check that
remorseless growth.
In Europe all we have is a lot of waffle about
bringing the aviation industry into the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) – a
process which will require years of the most tortuous negotiation and unlikely
to have any measurable effect on the growth of those emissions for at least
a decade.
If you look at road transport,
it’s now possible to drive cars whose impact
and emissions are only a tiny fraction of those produced by conventional vehicles.
But the incentives that we put up to try to encourage people to do so are
so ludicrously timid that the result is that hardly anyone is actually using
the vehicles, even with the technology that is available.
Here in
Britain we’re building thousands of homes every month whose
energy standards are way below those now routinely achieved in other countries.
And yet again the Government resolutely blocks any attempts to introduce real
incentives for builders, or tenants or homebuyers actually to insist on higher
standards.
At least, on the energy
front, there is a serious debate now taking place. I think that there a really
big danger, however, and perhaps a danger that the PM is deliberately fanning,
that if we make a big decision about nuclear, whatever that decision is, that
somehow diverts attention from the far more important areas that we should
be examining. Because the box would have been ticked - that we have sorted
the energy policy, so we can move on to something else.
No
single solution to Climate Change
That’s why I particularly welcome the ISIS report, which
recognises there is no silver bullet, no single solution to the challenge,
or how we achieve sustainability in the energy sector. The approach has to
be a multifaceted one.
Let me start with one plea,
yet again, for even more priority to be given to the purest and most unarguable
solution to the energy problem, and that is to use less of it.
Energy efficiency still
has an enormous role to play, yet too often it is merely the subject of lip
service from politicians, both national and local, businesses and consumers.
But even the Climate Change deniers cannot argue against more investment in
energy efficiency.
Turning to the report itself,
it covers a wide range of subjects, and I welcome that. It is very rightly
hardheaded about biofuels. And, that itself, is a reminder that in all our
efforts to generate more low carbon electricity, we must set prejudice and
ideology aside, and concentrate on the hard facts. Examine the life cycle
impact of different forms of electricity generation.
Waste
- an unexploited resource
The section on wastes is another very important area with considerable
unexploited potential. The EAC visited Sweden last week and
saw in Malmo the significant progress being made in biogas vehicle use.
I particularly welcome the report’s references to food as well. Again,
we’re all now paying lip service to the need to source more of what we eat
from local producers. But very little tangible action is taken to make that
happen. And, as a direct read across from there to aviation, if you
fly food all around the world on the basis that you do not have to meet any
of the costs of the environmental damage caused by the flights, then of course,
the competitive market place is distorted immediately.
There’s lots and lots of
material here and that’s enough from me.
Speech
made at Which Energy? Launch Conference, House of Commons, 25 May 2006, transcribed
by Sam Burcher
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