I am grateful to my now neighbour, Simon Thomas, for initiating this debate today. We’ve crossed swords on related issues many times in the year or so I’ve been a Member of this Assembly and I thought that where argument has failed possibly osmosis might have a better chance of arriving at a consensus.

I’ve no particular objection to personal carbon accounts and I certainly agree with some of the points that have been made today about air quality—they’re very important. Nitrous oxide and other gasses are, of course, pollutants. But I think it’s important for us to recognise also that carbon dioxide is not poison gas and is not a pollutant as such. I know that theories of global warming are what lie behind this proposal, but it’s important to recognise that the current carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, 390 parts per million—in a submarine, on average, it’s 1,500 parts per million, and we know that up to 8,000 parts per million human health is not impaired. So, this is not a danger to health in itself. I strongly agree with much of what Jenny Rathbone has said on food miles. We grow a lot of our own vegetables and so on at home. I’m an enthusiastic gardener and I wish more people would join me in that enthusiasm. I think we would all be better off.

I would like to address the motivation behind this proposal and the extent to which the costs imposed by the anti-global-warming policies can sometimes be perverse. As a result of high energy costs, which have resulted from the deliberate policy decisions of governments, not just in this country but elsewhere in the world, what we’ve done is to speed on the de-industrialisation processes of the west, and the perverse consequence of that has been to export heavily intensive energy consumers like steel, aluminium, glass and cement manufacture to parts of the world that have not accepted the obligations that we have in the west to reduce our carbon footprint. So, actually, we’ve, as a result of this, made matters even worse. I’m sure the environment Secretary will not wish to hear the word ‘China’ yet again in my speech, but China does actually produce 30 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions, India another 7 per cent, and, as I never tire of pointing out, the Paris agreements do not actually require them to reduce their carbon footprint. All they’re going to do is to reduce the output of carbon per head as their economies grow. So, China, in effect, has a green card in the sense that they’ll be allowed to increase their carbon emissions for at least another 20 years. So, any changes that come about as a result of our domestic policies will have no impact of any measurable kind upon what’s happening in the world and certainly have no impact on world temperatures. I have a problem with even the concept of a global temperature, because there is no easy means to calculate that. Satellite data have only been collected for a relatively short time, so we don’t have the kind of time series that we need in order to draw sensible conclusions of a policy kind, particularly conclusions that are going to lead to dramatic changes in lifestyle and in employment patterns.

I’d like to draw the attention of the Assembly to a paper that appeared only last week or the week before in an academic publication called ‘Nature Geoscience’, which addresses the problem of the pause in global temperature rises. Because, for the last 20 years, we’ve had no noticeable rise in world temperatures, and this pause cannot be explained by the computer models upon which the dire predictions of doom and gloom have been based. Myles Allen, who is a professor of geosystem science at Oxford university said to ‘The Times’ just a few days ago,

We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models. We haven’t seen that in the observations.’

His defence of these models is interesting. He said that they’d been assembled a decade ago so it wasn’t surprising that they deviated from reality. Yet those very same models are the ones that are being used to make predictions for 50 or 100 years ahead that have saddled taxpayers with huge costs to pay for alternative energy sources. So, we really ought, I think, to pause, in the same way that global temperatures seem to have paused, and really ask ourselves whether we need to plough ahead so rapidly with these schemes to reduce our carbon footprint when, first of all, we don’t know whether that’s actually going to be followed by other countries in the world who are the biggest polluters, if we regard carbon dioxide as a pollutant, and, secondly, we have to consider the impact upon the standard of living of our people, particularly those at the bottom of the income scale, who are the ones who are most clearly disadvantaged.