Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:26 pm on 13 October 2021.
We are in danger of being paralysed by the extent of the challenge in front of us, but, really, it is no use wringing our hands in despair; we really do have to grasp the moment, and we all have a part to play.
But I really don't think it's much use throwing darts at the UK Government to ask them for more devolution, because they are absolutely not interested. They hate devolution and they are doing everything possible to claw it back from us, using leaving the European Union as the opportunity to do it. 'Not a penny less' we were told would happen as a result of Brexit—that went well; £137 million less from the rural development programme and the hijacking of all the structural funds into their so-called shared prosperity fund. 'Take back control' didn't mean empowering local communities, just more power for the mega rich, who are now buying their influence over the UK Government ruling party.
So, let's forget what the UK Government isn't going to do for us; we know that. I agree with Rhys ab Owen that we could produce enough clean energy in order to decarbonise our domestic energy market, and we could be selling it to the countless numbers of people who want to buy it off us, but we haven't managed to do that so far, and we need to understand a little bit better as to why we've actually seen a dip in the production of renewable energy in Wales over the last few years. Perhaps I should declare an interest here, as my partner is a consultant with Bute Energy, who are prospecting in Wales. But we really do need to think about how we are going to accelerate the use of green renewable energy, because there is a huge demand for energy, both here in Wales and in the rest of Europe.
We hear the need to decarbonise our transport, and some of that is going to be about transferring to electric cars from fossil fuels, but we can't be affording to plug in these electric cars using the dirty fossil fuels that we're trying to get away from, so we've got to have a massive boost in renewable energy production. We've also got to decarbonise all our housing, and that means not just retrofitting all the existing housing that's already been built, which is nearly all our housing, but we've also got to put a stop to all these mass house builders who want to continue to build houses that are not fit for purpose. So, I do hope that the Minister is able to tell us when we are going to upgrade Part L of the building regulations to ensure that we're only producing zero-carbon standards in the future.
We also need to think about everything we do as individuals. And to be able to make the right choices, we've got to understand what the cost is of buying a particular product rather than another one. Because it's no point just exporting our carbon emissions by saying, 'I won't buy that because that produces too many carbon emissions here. We'll get somebody abroad to do this for us.'
We have to understand that if we're going to have all this industrial production of meat in these pig factories or these chicken factories, there's a cost to the world, not just in Wales and the pollution of our rivers, but what is it they're eating and where does it come from? If we are going to have animals produced non-sustainably—. Grass is a very sustainable mode of production of meat, but if we produce them by feeding them soya and corn, we're probably contributing to the massive deforestation of the Amazon.
So, we are going to need to educate everybody on how to make appropriate choices about everything that we do as well as nurturing our nature with just very, very small decisions around putting in window boxes and planting food for our own consumption and for our neighbours. These are the things that we can do, but I think we need to stop trying to think that somehow the UK Government are going to change their behaviour—they aren't—and we're going to have to do this for ourselves.