Alistair Strathern

I thank the Minister for the leadership she has shown on this issue, not just since taking up her role, but long before she came to this House—that is a powerful lesson at the heart of some of today’s debate. We have heard a lot from some Opposition Members about how inherently global this problem is, and that the UK decarbonising alone will not tackle climate change. They are obviously right—it is an inherently and intractably global problem that we cannot tackle alone—but they seem somehow to build from that to an argument that we will get other countries to go faster by going slower ourselves. The lesson that the Minister showed in a previous job by arguing for the Climate Change Act is that by showing global leadership, we can bring other countries along with us on this difficult journey. We brought in the Climate Change Act, and now 75% of the country’s GDP is covered by binding emissions targets. We know we need to go further, which is why the debate about how we meet those targets is so important—but it must be a debate about how we meet them. There has been a lot of loaded language about climate denialism, and I accept that Conservative Members are not denying the existence of climate change. However, by denying the real and existential consequences of not meeting the science-backed targets, they are engaging in a subtler, but no less pernicious form of denialism. That is betraying our constituents and their futures by failing to recognise the existential challenge of climate change, and by failing to engage with the real and important debate that we should all be having about how we meet those targets and the policy trade-offs needed.