Lord Mackinlay of Richborough (Con)

My Lords, I am the director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, so the House might believe that I am immediately against all this sort of thing, but that would not actually be true. I am certainly in favour of proper CO₂ accounting, hence my support for Amendments 14 and 15. We cannot do another Drax, dare I say, where we end up with a situation that sounds very renewable and sustainable, but when we peel the surface away, we are actually generating more CO₂ in creating the final outcome than by doing nothing. My concern if we allow crops, particularly if they are imported sustainable fuels that are derived from crops, is we do not have the CO₂ accounting arising in the UK, and we pat ourselves on the back and say how marvellous and virtuous we are, but the reality is that we have increased global CO₂ on an undertaking that is anything but sustainable. I would like an assurance from the Minister that, as we progress the sustainable aviation fuel future, there is proper mindfulness about the CO₂ effects of what we are doing. One of my grave concerns about the power-to-fuel ambitions is that they require such a huge amount of energy in the creation of the fuel that, by the end of the process, we will have actually created a lot more CO₂. I hope that we have learned something about CO₂ accounting, particularly on the back of the Drax experience, which allows virgin forests from North America to be cut down, presumably powered by petrol. It then goes to drying mills run by gas, is put on a diesel-powered train to a shipping port, comes across the Atlantic by a diesel-powered ship and is then burnt in a power station in the UK, and, hey presto, we say that it is zero-carbon. We have to do better than that as we progress a net-zero future. I do not want to see us conned and just kidding ourselves and the public that we are doing something for the right reasons when actually we are creating more CO₂. I would like that type of assurance from the Minister.