Welcome to our live Q&A session with Steve Webb, the climate change and energy spokesperson. It’s dead easy. Click into the box below to get started with your questions, or just to read what others are asking. The chat will go live from 6.30pm.
Note on how Cover It Live works: Once you’ve hit send, your question goes into a queue and waits for me (your host, Alix of Mortimer) to ok it. There is a facility for me to permanently allow up to ten commenters (so your questions appear straight away and don’t need moderating) but I probably won’t use this because that gives those ten people an unfair advantage in the unfolding chat, at the expense of others who haven’t asked their first question yet.
In the best liberal traditions of Lib Dem Voice, I’m not planning to be a heavy-handed moderator, but I will release the questions at intervals so that Steve has time to look at each one properly. Most humbly I beg your patience if your question doesn’t appear straight away. Exceptionally, if several people ask the same or a very similar question, I will release one as representative, which I hope people will understand. Note that you can put “Anonymous” in the name box if you like, and I don’t think a real email address is necessary either – just something in email format.
I have closed the comments on this post for now to keep everything within the live blog box, and I will re-open them after the session has finished. Let the games begin!
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Excellent discussion, good questions, good answers.
It would not be practical to resolve the nuclear question in this session – it was a big talking point when Steve visited my local party last year.
I think however that Steve got the balance right between working with business but recognising that business cannot always be trusted, and that the state will have to take action which may include legislating bans in the last resort, but only as a last resort.
I think the question about “lack of credibility of the Lib Dems with the business community” can also be turned round. How much credibility does the business community have with the Lib Dems. They need to lobby with care if they want us to water down our green committments. They ought to be better advised to try and make themselves the solution rather than the problem.
Thanks for asking my question. By a strange coincidence, I also received this evening a reply to the same question, which I had submitted through Vince Cable’s website in November.
Neither answer gave a very direct explanation for the reported decrease in the “green switch” from £6.7bn in July last year to £3bn now, but the implication seems to be that it’s because the government has already raised green taxes itself (by £3.7bn, presumably).
Steve Webb’s reply mentions increases in tax on aviation which, from online sources, were expected to raise an additional £1.5bn a year by 2012. I believe these proposals were withdrawn in the pre-budget report, but Vince Cable wouldn’t have known about that when he came up with the £3bn figure.
Vince Cable’s reply mentions increases in taxation on large vehicles, which are reportedly worth £1.2bn a year.
Presumably there’s another billion’s worth somewhere else.
Credibility of the Lib Dem vs businesses, I think it depends where and at what level you’re talking about – where we actually run councils (i.e. Newcastle) credibility with local/regional businesses can be directly built up through decisions make by the Lib Dem controlled authority. However, there will be a credibility gap nationally until we form part of a government.
I was out having some drinks to celebrate my victory on a scratchard.
Very informative answers. I hope we have more Q+A sessions like this.
Yes lots of good stuff here, but I must say I’m not really satisfied. Nuclear, a proven technology is dismissed as too little to late (although how little and how late depends on how much and how soon it is implemented) whereas CCS, which may never work, is described as “essential”. (And the nuclear waste problem is peanuts compared to the problem of global warming. Give me 1000 times as much nuclear waste if you can fix global warming, and I will take that deal.)
CCS, specifically “CCS-ready” is simply an excuse to keep building coal-fired power stations, dirty as ever. Maybe it will be made to work, maybe soon enough, and maybe the carbon will stay in the ground for geological timescales. But it seems grossly irresponsible to put this ahead of proven technologies.
“Shameless lobbyist” reports that 100% carbon reductions is seen as implausible by analysts – probably even if we did go with nuclear. They could be wrong of course, but you can only beat analysis with better analysis. The pertinent question is what will work, not what is the political fashion.
On the question of priorities, of course I don’t want nuclear coming before renewables or building standards. But if private capital is available, only wanting an underwriting of decomissioning costs, then that is a good deal because we are getting, in the worst case, low carbon energy on interest free credit for the life of the reactors, just when we need it. Priority with today’s money can still go to renewables.
“CCS, specifically “CCS-ready” is simply an excuse to keep building coal-fired power stations, dirty as ever.”
But I thought Lib Dem policy was no new nuclear or coal-fired power stations?
Re carbon capture, we certainly don’t think there should be new coal fired plants that are simply ‘CCS-ready’. But if Joe doesn’t think the world needs CCS, how would he deal with the emissions from China and India’s large and growing number of coal-fired power plants?
Steve, sure, if it works, in the end, we should use it. And I hope it is in time.
Given that we do not know now whether it will work, we have another reason to maximise our electricity generation by low carbon methods.
Turning off perfectly functional coal plant is way way up the marginal cost abatement curve, whateveryoucallit thing, and so just about the last thing we should be doing.
CCS isn’t just about new dirty coal-fired power stations, carbon capture can also be applied to combined-cycle gas turbines (cleaner) and biomass (clean and if stored actually takes carbon out of the environment). In that final respect CCS could be the technology that in the very long term reverses global warming.
The technology might also be used to remove and store other pollutants in future. The capture technology afterall is largely about big holes in the ground several hundred meters beneath the sea bed and the pipelines that carry it there.
I do think China is the “elephant in the room” as far as carbon emissions are concerned – to such an extent that unless a way can be found of dealing with the huge increase in Chinese carbon emissions, it’s rather pointless jumping through hoops to achieve much smaller reductions in the West.
So Steve Webb deserves credit for at least mentioning China. But on the whole it is mentioned pretty seldom, which makes a lot of the activity on this issue look rather like the efforts of King Canute.
CCF, I agree that there is usually a lack of a big picture when talking about what we can do about global warming.
I have tried to restore that big picture here.
Thanks for posting my question and sorry I couldn’t be here for the discussion. Lots of interesting points. I think the min thrust of my question may have been missed by the editing (I realise it was far too long in the original form).
What is and is not politically feasible doesn’t matter, in my opinion. A politician who is willing to lead, and set goals that are extraordinary, is what is needed here, and I was asking why there were none to be seen (at least within the UK scene). I ask again, then, will Mr Webb seek to become a leader, or merely adopt policy stances that are sufficiently in advance of government policy to appease the majority and leave it at that?
“CCF, I agree that there is usually a lack of a big picture when talking about what we can do about global warming.
I have tried to restore that big picture here.”
Thanks for providing this link.
It seems to me that the problem of China remains, though.
As for green taxes, I can only say that the £3bn additional green taxes that the Lib Dems are currently advocating are far too small to have any significant effect on the problem.
If I understand correctly, this represents something like 0.5% of total taxation.
Put another way, the green shift can be compared with the £12.5bn package of VAT cuts (amounting to 2.5%) announced in the pre-budget report, which has been widely criticised (by Lib Dems among others) as too small to have any significant effect on spending patterns. The green shift is less than a quarter the size of the VAT cuts.
Yet another way of looking at it is as a rise in green taxation per household of about £100 a year. But energy bills have already risen by 3 or more times this amount over the last year alone.
If green taxes are the way to avert climate change, surely they need to be far bigger than these gnats’ bites.