It's a pleasure to take part in this debate, opened by the Chair of the committee in his usual robust and constructively critical way. It's good to see that these committees, which operate by consensus, can nevertheless be robust in their conclusions. I draw a slightly different conclusion from some of his criticisms about the Government failing to meet its targets. I couldn't be more delighted that it has failed to meet its targets for carbon emission reductions, because those can only be achieved at the most ruinous cost to the taxpayer and the electricity consumer. The economic dislocation that this policy has created over recent decades can't be underestimated. We used to export manufactured goods from many industries—now we have exported those industries themselves to other parts of the world in order to avoid the high costs of production that this policy has imposed.

I can welcome certain parts of the report, although it's about climate change mitigation, on other grounds. The proposals to plant more trees have my enthusiastic approval. I planted 36 trees myself last week in my own garden. I think everybody, insofar as they could, should do the same. And I certainly wholly approve of the conclusions of the report in relation to improvement of the housing stock. That's vitally important, and I take the points that Julie Morgan has just made in her very interesting speech.

But I do take issue with Julie in one thing that she said, when she referred to the beast from the east and the hot summer that we just enjoyed as being a reflection of climate change. Well, of course, climate is always changing to an extent, but whether we can draw conclusions that it is changing in the way that she inferred—implied, rather—in her speech is another thing altogether. I remember very well the summer of 1976, although I missed it because I spent most of it in California, and I have been waiting for another one like that for 42 years. So, these things do occur from time to time. There isn't any firm evidence that extreme weather events are any more frequent today than they've been at any time in our lifetimes. I'm often called a climate change denier, but I'm not a climate change denier at all because I recognise that climate change is constant. Climate change is indifferent and unpredictable, and certainly unpredicted in ways, and often in different ways in different parts of the world. It always has done and it always will. The issue is whether that is a cause for alarm. Certainly, the kind of alarm that the more extreme advocates of these climate change policies are putting forward is wholly unjustified by any observable research that I know of.

It's a belief system really and needs to be evaluated as—[Interruption.] I give way.