SPEAKING ON MAKING BRITAIN ZERO CARBON

North East MEP Fiona Hall spoke at the Lib Dem party conference plans, that were later adopted by members as party policy to make ‘Making Britain Zero Carbon’.

She said:

Conference, this motion has an excellent sense of urgency.  As many speakers have underlined, we only have about eight years in which to get climate change under control and within the two degree limit.

That is the blink of an eye in terms of politics – two parliaments, two lots of local council elections.  And a lot of actions touted as ways of tackling climate change simply cannot bite soon enough.  Nuclear?  Forget it – Chris Davies even admitted just now that it cannot come on stream fast enough and it distracts from what needs to be done now.  Carbon capture and storage should help in due course but it’s not proven technology yet.

Even emissions trading is unlikely to deliver in time.  Markets take a while to get established.  We are liberals, we believe in markets but there is no precedent for markets alone delivering to a very tight time scale.

So the prospect of us delivering a cap on global warming by 2015 is not very bright.  But there is one tool we have and can use now and need no new technology for and that’s energy efficiency.

Unfortunately, under Labour this tool is largely being ignored.  The cost could be insisting that new homes are built now to zero carbon standards, like in Upper Austria, bit it’s not.  The Government could be carrying out a rolling programme of energy-efficiency upgrading of the pre 1980 housing stock, like Germany, but it’s not.

The Government could at least have organised the vocational training that will be needed to roll out such innovative programmes – but it hasn’t and the few programmes that do exist are massively oversubscribed.

Energy efficiency is the most immediately achievable and cost-effective way of cutting our carbon emissions and yet the UK government is fiddling around while the planet burns up.

Energy efficiency is what we should be doing today.  And of course if we made the cake of our total energy consumption a lot smaller, then it is easier to increase the slice of that cake which is clean, renewable energy.

But I want to say a word about the liquid fuels target in lines 46-47. 

Biofuels do have a role to play, particularly where local crops can feed into existing refinery infrastructure as in Teesside.  But we have to get the sustainability criteria in place.

There will be European proposals this December on how to ensure sustainability.  The pan European target on biofuels agreed by heads of Government in March is 10% by 2020.  If we were to push in the UK for a Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation of 10% by 2015 then we would see an expansion ahead of the sustainability criteria and ahead of the industry’s capacity to expand European rapeseed and ethanol production.  Make no mistake, 10% by 2015 means importing palm oil.

So please vote in support of this excellent motion but against lines 46-47.