Baroness Sheehan (LD)

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his response. I thank all contributors for their valuable and well-thought-out responses to this report; they are very much appreciated. I expected no less from my esteemed colleagues on the committee because their participation in the discussions, as well as the engaged way in which their contributions were made during our deliberations, left me in no doubt that we would have a very good debate today. I thank the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, for his contribution in the gap. His point—and that of the noble Lord, Lord Jay—about the disturbing international scenario in which we now find ourselves will prove a challenge in terms of tackling not just methane emissions but carbon dioxide emissions. I was a bit heartened by China’s recent announcement that it will not ease up on its efforts to tackle climate change. Indeed, at a UN summit as a precursor to the COP 30 meeting, it announced that its NDC, which will be due some time before COP 30, will encompass sector-wide emissions across the economy; that was heartening to hear. Not only will they cover the whole economy: they will cover all greenhouse gases, including methane. We will wait with interest to see the detail. I will not detain noble Lords too long—I am sure that we all need to move on—but I stress the need for better communication to farmers, which the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, mentioned. There was consensus on this from the NFU, the Nature Friendly Farming Network, and the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board. Without farmers on board, we will not get to grips with methane either at home or abroad. I am not going to go into detail on the other contributions, save to say that I was heartened by what I heard. Let me just leave noble Lords with the thought that carbon dioxide concentrations are increasing in the atmosphere. The Mauna Loa Observatory—I hope that NOAA does not get to erase all this data—has been monitoring carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. It has not been monitoring it for the past 800,000 years, but we have data from ice cores in Antarctica that shows that from a steady baseline of 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide before the Industrial Revolution, we have seen, in terms of ecological time, a straight-line increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide to today’s average of 426 parts per million. We are in uncharted territory, so tackling the short-term but powerful greenhouse gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide, are our route to avoiding some of the disastrous tipping points that we are otherwise hurtling towards. We have an opportunity to buy time, and we should take it. I beg to move.