Diolch yn fawr, Lywydd. I’m very pleased to bring a Plaid Cymru debate to the Assembly today, which I genuinely hope everyone in the Assembly will support, because the purpose of the debate is to endorse, from Wales, the international agreement on climate change reached in Paris last year just before Christmas. We do that in advance of the international assumption of the agreement on 4 November and the fact that the agreement will be discussed in the Conference of the Parties in Marrakesh later on this month. I understand the Cabinet Secretary is attending that. I want to empower her and I want her to take a strong message from Wales that we’re part of the international fight to tackle climate change and we want to play our role, and that we want to do more than play our role—we want to lead in as many aspects as we can as a nation.

I want Wales to become a ‘zero hero’, as they say, a hero for zero carbon, working on a trajectory that takes us away from using carbon for our energy and using alternative sources. I do that with a very personal interest as well because, very recently, I visited Pen y Cymoedd in my friend’s constituency, Vikki Howells’s constituency, and my own home valley of Aberdare and Cwm Cynon.

Pen y Cymoedd is the large, renewable energy windfarm that’s just been constructed across the Heads of the Valleys, stretching from Ogmore almost, over towards Merthyr Tydfil. Seventy-odd turbines have been erected above Tower colliery. You pass Tower colliery in order to get to Pen y Cymoedd. My great uncle worked in Tower colliery. In fact, in the 1950s, he was the leader of the gang that broke through from Aberdare to the Rhondda. They didn’t talk too much about that; there wasn’t a great Valleys rivalry in those days. But, he broke through from Tower colliery and led the gang that broke through to unite the pits underneath that mountain. And that mountain is closed for coal now, but it’s open for wind, it’s open for renewables, it’s open for a new future.

And this debate is really about embracing the future. We’re not looking back to the past. In the same valley is the opencast at Bryn Pica where my father worked. I don’t want to go back to that past, I want to go back to an energy future in the Valleys and the rest of Wales that really is safe and sustainable, gives high-quality jobs for our young people, and is healthy—and is healthy. When those seventy-odd turbines at Pen y Cymoedd are redundant, or may need to be repowered, or even come down because we’ve moved on, they will leave nothing but peat behind them. They won’t leave coal slags to bury villages, and they won’t leave pollution to destroy our rivers. So, this is why we must embrace a real revolution of zero carbon and a real energy revolution in Wales. And that’s why Paris is so important. When you get a situation where China—China, we’re told, is the great carbon polluter and is not doing anything about renewables, but China’s overtaken the European Union on renewables, I have to tell you—is complaining that Trump will be pulling out of the Paris agreement, the world has changed. The world has changed and we must change with that and, more than that, we must lead that change here in Wales.

So we have set forward this debate today, hoping that the whole Assembly will join with us to send that message. It’s also an opportunity to review what the Government has set out for itself and what the Government is likely to achieve in the near future, because there are very good and positive ambitious targets that this Government has set out, both in terms of policy and in terms of legislation. So, for a start, we have a 3 per cent reduction in our own basket of domestic greenhouse gas reductions to do year on year from 2011. We’re trying to aim for a 40 per cent reduction in gross greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 against the 1990 baseline, a commitment that the Ministers have confirmed to me is still a commitment for this Government, although it’s not in the programme for government. And we passed the Environment (Wales) Act 2016 in the previous Assembly, which set out a new approach to tackling and measuring climate change, including the long-term goal, by 2050, of reaching 80 per cent lower than the baseline of greenhouse gas emissions, and that’s really where you start to get into zero-carbon territory and really where we start to see some real changes in Wales.

So, we want to understand what the Government is likely to do under the Environment (Wales) Act and also under the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015, which, of course, has seven well-being goals and several of them—three of them, in fact—all relate specifically to climate change. So, the context is, if anyone doubts that we should endorse an international agreement because we’re not an international nation state parliament, I accept that, but our legislation has already moved us almost there, so why should we not now state internationally that we want to join with other nations in doing that? There is, however, a weakness, and it would be remiss not to use a debate like this to highlight some of the weaknesses within the Government’s own framework.

There is a move under the environment Act for carbon budgets and interim targets, but they won’t be published until 2018, so we are losing already some of the initial impetus and movement forward that we should be having. The Welsh Labour Government has produced a programme for government, but it produced a programme for government and a draft budget before publishing its future generations Act aims, so really that is the cart before the horse—that’s talking about what you’re spending before you’ve decided what you should be spending the money on, and that is the wrong way around, and it’s a lost opportunity in this budget cycle that I hope the Government will correct in the next budget cycle.

And, unfortunately, the UK Energy and Climate Change Committee that’s examining—[Interruption.] Just in a second, if I may; I’ll just finish this point. The UK committee on climate change examining the Government’s programme for carbon reduction says that we are not going to meet our 2050 target unless we have more rigorous and more intense action. I’ll give way to Mark Reckless.