Contribution
My Lords, I start by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for pointing out that I am actually here. I intervened on my noble friend Lady Stowell to make the point that we all support the introduction of AI, but AI is going to be tremendously consumptive of electricity. Electricity prices are actually very high in this country, and I attribute that to the targets we have set for reaching net zero, which I think we should be ignoring. We should not ignore net zero, but we should ignore the targets, which are too short and are damaging the British economy. That is the reason for my amendment.
The noble Lord, Lord McNally, suggested my intervention was motivated by some tradition in the other House of intervening very early on in the debate and then catching the next train to the country. So I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for pointing out that I am still here.
Things have changed tremendously since I first tabled this amendment. Initially, the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, was rather hoping that I might withdraw my amendment. I think he hoped the Bill would go through without any debate and on the nod. That should not happen. The whole world of energy is now changing quite substantially, and we have got to be very wary of setting extremely arbitrary targets for reaching net zero, which have been damaging our economy and have led to extraordinarily high energy prices.
Since I tabled the amendment, we have had the report from the Tony Blair Institute, which is interesting because one the main things it pointed is that there is absolutely no way we are going to reach these global targets, for the simple reason that a very large number of developing countries are producing their own energy and want to produce it as cheaply as they possibly can. They are going to go on using fossil fuels for the indefinite future. Therefore, is it sensible for us, producing less than 1% of the world’s emissions, to set ourselves a net-zero target, when China, for instance, is producing 60% of its electricity from coal-fired power stations? Not only are the Chinese using probably the most efficient fossil fuel for producing electricity, they are also massively polluting the atmosphere in which their people have to live.
At the same time, we have stopped producing any form of electricity through coal. We have no more coal-burning power stations. When this started, the great theory was that somehow we were going to be leaders in the world; we would set an example and others would follow. Quite clearly, the Chinese are not following our example: they are merely taking massive advantage of the fact they can produce manufactures much more cheaply than we can here. The drain of manufacturing industry continues from this country, and that is driven, among other things, by the fact that our electricity prices are so much higher than those in the rest of the world. I admire the Government for having the ambition to reindustrialise this country, but it is not going to happen if our electricity prices are so much higher than everybody else’s in the world. This is one of the problems we are living with today: we are not competitive, and many other countries are taking advantage of us in this way.
I know the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, has had association with the Drax power station. I have the most enormous reservations about a so-called green power station, which is supposed to be fulfilling all the requirements of net zero but is polluting the atmosphere through every conceivable stage of its process of feeding fuel into that power station.
It is supposed to be dealing with wooden pellets that come from North America. There is a suggestion that quite a lot of trees have been cut down in North America as well to produce these wooden pellets. When the wooden pellets are eventually burned, they must be almost as contaminating as a coal-fired power station, if not quite. At the end of the day, we should not be contributing to CO2 emissions through generating power, even if it is under the auspices that somehow this is a renewable source, because I do not think that it makes any sense at all.