Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:57 pm on 4 December 2018.
Obviously, the Welsh Conservatives will be supporting the regulations that are laid before the Assembly this afternoon. If you look at the comments of David Attenborough yesterday at the climate conference that is being held by the United Nations in Poland—. And it most probably is appropriate to focus maybe on the climate conferences that have periodically happened, because the First Minister next week will be standing down, and one of the first acts that he undertook when he took over as First Minister was to go to Copenhagen with the then environment Secretary, Jane Davidson. We've seen various degrees of failure and success at international conferences. I think Copenhagen was regarded as a failure; Paris was regarded as a success. And I think we all wait to see what the outcomes in Poland will be over the coming days to see whether we move any further forward to meeting what is a moral obligation on countries such as Wales, the United Kingdom, especially in the developed world, to actually put new technology to best use and reduce our carbon usage, especially when you look at the prophecies that, potentially, by the middle part of this century, could have dramatic implications for people in low-lying areas not just in Europe but across the globe, and the disappearance of countries.
And this report that the climate change committee has put together I wholly endorse, in particular the way the Chairman of the committee brought forward its conclusions. It is worth noting that, obviously, the report does identify the Welsh Government potentially missing its 2020 target and, very often, it's easy maybe to set some of these targets that are very much in the future, thinking that there'll be someone else who'll have to deliver that. It is a fact that we all need to put our shoulder to the wheel from an opposition perspective, and put pressure on Government to be ambitious in the way it wants to meet these targets, but also to work with businesses and work with communities and individuals to make sure that we all play our part and people do not feel as we've seen in France now, where environmental action has provoked mass unrest because people have not been taken along with the proposals that the Government in France has delivered.
And so we will continue our position of monitoring this. We will continue our position of support where that support can help advance the cause of environmental improvement in Wales. But the round-table discussion, I think, last week that the committee held was a good sounding board for many of the organisations that came in, and if we can map out a route that shows that this is actually a profitable and beneficial way for business to engage in adopting new technology to reduce their carbon output, and, in particular, as individuals focus on what their output is as individuals, collectively we can make a big difference. But my word of caution is: when you look at what has gone on in France over the last couple of days, we need to take people with us when we're bringing forward these measures, rather than just some sort of academic exercise that plays out on paper but which in reality is very, very difficult to deliver. And I do look forward, as the Welsh Conservatives look forward, to looking at and scrutinising the delivery plan that, obviously, the Cabinet Secretary has committed to bringing forward in March of next year, because that would be a critical pathway to making sure that what is in the regulations that we are discussing today and the report that we have put forward as a committee can and will be delivered.