It’s always a pleasure to listen to the Cabinet Secretary, but I’m afraid I can’t be quite so complimentary about the contents of the statement itself. I’m going to introduce a certain diversity into the proceedings this afternoon, as might be expected. I want to question the assumptions upon which the statement is made. I’ve got three points to make altogether.

First of all, the statement says that the Paris agreement is gaining momentum and there’s a clear commitment to decarbonise economies and energy systems across the globe. But I’m afraid all the evidence is the opposite. China and India between them emit more than a third of the world’s carbon dioxide. China is planning to double its output of carbon dioxide in the next 15 years, and India to triple it. That’s one reason why President Trump of the United States, which also emits 15 per cent of the world’s carbon dioxide, wants to resile from the Paris accords altogether, because he says that he was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris. And what motivates him is that there is a let-out clause in the Paris agreement itself, article 4(7), which says:

‘The extent to which developing country Parties will effectively implement their commitments under the Convention…will take fully into account that economic and social development and poverty eradication are the first and overriding priorities of the developing country Parties.’

That is why, although China and India have signed up in principle to the fundamental theories behind the climate change convention, they’re not actually going to contribute anything in practical terms to its realisation. Even in Germany, which fully signed up to anti-global warming policies, carbon dioxide emissions have risen in each of the last eight years, including the present one. So, I’m afraid the world is not going in the direction that the Cabinet Secretary assumes.

Secondly, there is an assumption here that the economic case for renewables continues to strengthen and that renewables are lower in costs, as confirmed by the recent contracts for difference auction. Well, I’m afraid it isn’t possible to draw that inference from these prices, and I commend to the Cabinet Secretary this publication by Professor Gordon Hughes, professor of economics at the University of Edinburgh, who analyses this in his publication, ‘Offshore Wind Strike Prices: Behind the headlines’. His fundamental point here is that these are complicated contracts, but are fundamentally options. They’re not actually necessarily going to be realised, these projects, at the prices that have been awarded. And, at £74.75 for the Triton Knoll contract, and £57 for the Hornsea Two and Moray East contracts, the three that have recently been in the headlines in the newspapers—that would represent, if it did correspond to a fall in operating costs and construction costs of 55 per cent for offshore wind in the last five years. That is simply not credible. Even though there have been advances in turbine technology, there is no way in which costs of construction and development in offshore waters could possibly have fallen by 55 per cent in that period. In fact, to some extent, because we’re having to go further and further offshore in order to build these windfarms, then costs are likely to increase, or at least the extra costs of going into deeper waters will outweigh the technology costs.

So, what we’re seeing here is a replication of what happened 20 years ago in relation to the fossil fuel obligation, because there 247 windfarm contracts were awarded, but only 57 were actually built—a sixth of the capacity that was intended. What happened there was that the early contracts that had high prices were built and the later contracts with low prices weren’t, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing here. So, this is all part of the Government’s policy—the UK Government as well as the Welsh Government—of soaking the poor. We produce nothing in global terms in carbon dioxide—Wales, probably 0.1 per cent of world emissions. We’re the poorest part of the United Kingdom, with a quarter of our households in fuel poverty, and yet the household bills of ordinary people are rising year in and year out—£115 a year at the moment in green levies on the average electricity bill. That will rise, by 2020, to £170, and, by 2030, to £245 a year in constant pounds. I think this is an appalling policy to impose greater and greater costs upon those who are least able to withstand them.