Lord Teverson (LD):...However, the world has made progress. In
2014-16, emissions of carbon dioxide across the globe plateaued. In
Kyoto, a big issue was the rising levels of emissions from both
China and India. They were much smaller economies then but
were growing very quickly, and they felt, rightly, that the
developed world should take the strain on mitigation. However, we
saw in Paris both those countries getting involved, with China
starting to say that it should be the leader,...Request free trial
(LD):...However, the world has made progress.
In 2014-16, emissions of carbon dioxide across the globe plateaued.
In Kyoto, a big issue was the rising levels of emissions from both
China and India. They were much smaller economies
then but were growing very quickly, and they felt, rightly, that
the developed world should take the strain on mitigation. However,
we saw in Paris both those countries getting involved, with China
starting to say that it should be the leader, taking over in many
ways from the European Union and the United States...
...Despite all that good news, there is not-so-good news as
well. In 2017 global emissions went up by 1.6%; in 2018 it is
estimated that they will be up by something like 2.6%. I regret to
say that much of that growth has come from China
and India. Even in the EU, where our track
record has been good, our ability to reduce carbon emissions has
plateaued and started to go down. Even if everybody who signed up
to the Paris Agreement performs, we will still have a rise of some
3% in global emissions. Here in the UK, our great achievement of a
43% reduction is almost exclusively from the power sector, nearly
all from taking coal out of the system. We are almost at the end of
that road and cannot push that policy further; therefore, we have
big questions about where we go, particularly now we are challenged
by the withdrawal of Hitachi and Toshiba from our nuclear
programme. We are now seen as being top of the subsidies league on
fossil fuels within Europe, with some £10 billion-worth of
subsidies per annum—although, probably like the Government, I
question how that arithmetic was arrived at....
(LD):...Let me
digress slightly and mention the “Give it up” scheme being trialled
in India, where people have been asked to
give up voluntarily their liquid petroleum gas subsidy. Some 10
million people have done so. The money generated is being used by
the Government to provide cooking gas to poor families—now there is
an idea...
(CB):...It
is surely worth while for the UK, given its traditional expertise
in nuclear energy, to explore a variety of fourth-generation
concepts, which could prove cheaper, more standardised and safer
than existing nuclear designs. The faster these clean technologies
advance, the sooner their prices will fall so that they become
affordable to, for instance, India, where the health of the poor is now
jeopardised by smoky stoves burning wood and dung, and where there
would otherwise be pressure to build coal-fired power stations. It
would be hard to imagine a more inspiring goal for our young
engineers than to spearhead improved clean and affordable
energy...
The (Con):...It
is the melting of not just glacial ice but sea ice that has caused
problems and has contributed to the moving of magnetic north.
Recent research on the movement of magnetic north, which has
suddenly accelerated, has shown that it is human abstraction of
water, particularly in Eurasia and India, that has helped to shift magnetic
north. What does my noble friend on the Front Bench anticipate
being the effect of this on climate change? Does he think it is now
increasingly likely, as some scientists are predicting, that we
will get a global shift again? These happen every 400,000 years or
so. The last one was 780,000 years ago, so perhaps we are due for a
global shift. That will complicate matters not a little, I
suggest...
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