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Bernard Jenkin's Speeches In Parliament Related to Climate

We've found 20 Parliamentary debates in which Bernard Jenkin has spoken about climate-related matters.

Here are the relevant sections of their speeches.

• 2 Sep 2026: EU Membership Referendum: Impact on the UK

  10:22

  I will finish on the question of forecasts, which are all conjectural. They are all based on what the British economy might look like compared with a basket of other economies, including the United States, which has had a huge fiscal stimulus and an AI boom, and has more free enterprise policies. The fact is that since we left the European Union, Wolfgang Münchau, who somewhat reluctantly voted remain, has made it clear that leaving was an economic non-event. We were growing at about the same rate of France and Germany, and we still are. There has been no smashing disaster in the economy. There is a disaster in Scotland, where the SNP is campaigning against reopening the North sea and supports the high energy costs imposed by the ridiculous dash to net zero—the Government are doing that too—but the fact is that we are better off outside the EU in the long term.

  [Source]

• 12 Nov 2025: Energy

  17:12

  My right hon. Friend is making a very able speech explaining why the clean power 2030 action plan is so ruinous for consumers. What she has not mentioned is that trying to connect up this very dispersed array of wind farms across the North sea requires an enormous amount of new infrastructure. We now know that the load factors are being reduced, so we will require 30% more wind turbines to create the same net zero effect. The wind farm investors themselves do not have to pay the full infrastructure costs for connecting all that up; it is the consumers who pick up the bill. So, there is another hidden subsidy for wind power that is not reflected in the guaranteed prices that are already being paid.

  [Source]

  17:33

  The Minister will let me explain why, in the Alice in Wonderland world of the Government’s net zero policies, it is right to import liquefied natural gas, which for some reason does not count in our carbon footprint, instead of producing our own gas, which would count but which would be cheaper, far easier and more carbon-efficient to produce in our own country. Why are the Government pursuing that ludicrous policy, which is self-harming the economy, making our trade deficit worse and losing tax revenues for the Government because we are not exploiting our natural resources?

  [Source]

• 14 Jul 2025: State of Climate and Nature

  16:30

  I am as passionate as the Secretary of State about achieving net zero across the world and about the decline in species in our natural environment, but that cannot be the only thing we worry about. I do not know whether he has had time to read the “Fiscal risks and sustainability” report produced last week, but it shows that the cost to the public Exchequer of achieving net zero will be 21% of GDP. We know that an argument is going on inside the Government and inside the Labour party about this very issue. This is a question of balancing the risks, because if the Government run out of money because they are overspending, there will not be any money to spend on reversing climate change.

  [Source]

• 6 Mar 2025: North Sea Energy

  I am in favour of net zero, and this country has achieved a great deal in working towards that, but what planet is the Minister’s Department on? Is she unaware that there is now a national security crisis that demands much higher defence expenditure? Is she aware that the costs of net zero are inflicting untold harm on our industry and have done for some years? It is now time to prioritise economic growth, to target cheap energy instead of net zero, and to generate growth and energy exports in order that we can afford the defence we need. The Department is living on another planet, and the Minister should listen to her Chancellor and her Business Secretary, who are trying to give her this advice.

  [Source]

• 26 Nov 2024: Electricity Grid Upgrades

  09:30

  I chair a cross-party group of MPs from Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk. We are working to promote the Clean Power 2030 objective, but we want to deliver it more cheaply and quickly, because it is becoming increasingly clear that undergrounding high voltage direct current cables is the way forward for the great national grid upgrade. Undergrounding will carry public consent and will avoid delays, and will therefore be cheaper as well as better for the countryside. Relying on new lines of pylons for the entire upgrade, as proposed, will delay decarbonising the national grid, because they arouse such hostility and will end up costing more because of the delays.

  This debate is therefore not just local. Decarbonisation is one of the great national challenges that the United Kingdom faces. How it is achieved, how quickly and at what cost is an issue of national importance. The National Energy System Operator’s “Clean Power 2030” report is welcome, but it highlights the scale of the challenge. NESO is clear that public support is critical to achieving those ambitions, but its response to the Secretary of State in that document warns that losing public consent is a significant threat to delivering projects on time and within budget.

  and that the transition to net zero only works

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  09:41

  Underground HVDC offers a scalable, future-proof solution that can be delivered with far less environmental impact, with public support and much more quickly. Schemes without pylons that are already planned by National Grid—for example, in north-east England—are being delivered without public opposition or long delays, which seems to be an enormous advantage for the Government’s objective of decarbonising the grid. There is no comparable resistance from campaign groups, which is clear evidence that underground HVDC gets public support, making it a far more practical and feasible solution.

  [Source]

  09:44

  I am grateful for the hon. Lady’s intervention. As the new Liberal Democrat MP for Chelmsford, she demonstrates that this is a cross-party campaign, supported by people who are as committed to decarbonisation as anything else.

  Globally, HVDC is becoming the standard for modern energy networks. By investing in HVDC now, the UK can maintain its leadership in renewable energy, create jobs and develop skills that will keep us competitive. The alternative is clinging to outdated, mid-20th century technology that will leave us falling behind other countries. Germany will not give up HVDC undergrounding altogether, but that is the presumption in our planning system, which I suggest the Government need to revise.

  The Government must show decisive leadership and embrace an HVDC future. This is about more than just reducing costs and avoiding delays; it is about ensuring we meet our renewable energy goals in a way that works for communities, the environment, the economy and the planet.

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• 31 Oct 2024: Income tax (charge)

  14:10

  What is the true cost of decarbonisation? That is something that the Government are hopelessly naive about. It is as though investing in decarbonisation is somehow a get-out-of-jail-free card, and everybody’s bills will start to come down, but anyone involved in the industry will say that that is not the case. The need to dynamise our zombie economy is still there and being made worse by the burdens that this Government have inflicted on us. How will we re-industrialise our economy when deglobalisation has taken away the opportunity to import all the cheap things that we used to make, but no longer do? Those are the real strategic challenges, and the Budget does not begin to address them.

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• 8 Oct 2024: Energy Security

  Could I invite the Minister to meet a cross-party group of MPs from the east of England to discuss how the review conducted by the electricity system operator can contribute to energy security and in particular to look at how undergrounding high voltage direct current cables could be cheaper in the long term than pylons and more efficient for achieving net zero? Will he agree at least to have a meeting with us on that basis?

  [Source]

• 5 Sep 2024: Great British Energy Bill

  My right hon. Friend referred to the letter that was sent by the Secretary of State to Fintan Slye, the head of National Grid ESO and, curiously, there is nothing in the Secretary of State’s letter that refers to the need to lower electricity prices. The term “electricity prices” does not appear in the letter and neither does the term “security of supply”. Does she agree that those are the two great concerns about rushing the 2030 decarbonisation target?

  [Source]

  In fact, that was given away in an astonishing letter that the Secretary of State wrote to the director of the electricity system operator, asking for all the information that one would expect the Government to have given that this was a major platform in their manifesto. [ Interruption. ] The Under-Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, the hon. Member for Rutherglen (Michael Shanks), shakes his head—I will give way to him if he wants to intervene—but where are the numbers? Where is the data backing up this wild assertion that just going all out for renewables will provide security of supply and lower energy costs? It is a mantra that Labour Members keep repeating to themselves with increasing enthusiasm and vehemence to make up for the fact that they have no numbers to back up their assertions.

  Let me be clear about one thing: I am an advocate of achieving net zero. I believe in the target of net zero by 2050—indeed, I am a member of the net zero all-party parliamentary group. When Members hear me speak, they are not listening to some luddite or climate change denier. I want this policy to work, but there are very considerable risks, which are evidenced by reading between the lines for what is not in the Secretary of State’s letter and what is clearly flagged in Fintan Slye’s response to it.

  [Source]

  13:50

  The Minister shakes his head, but if we have shut down all that capacity—if we cannot generate the electricity ourselves—we will have to get it from other places. There are phenomena called wind droughts, which can go on for very long periods. What are we going to do when the wind turbines are not turning and the sun is not shining during a very cold spell in the middle of winter? We had one or two close scares this winter. The generating margin that we used to enjoy has gone. The great risk of accelerating the decarbonisation of the electricity system is that there will be more appeals for voluntary or compulsory restraint from industry, because industry is the hidden customer that is shut off when we are short of electricity, or we risk more brownouts or even blackouts. That is not impossible, so where is the data upon which the Minister is placing so much confidence that shows these forecasts to be wrong? I am not making them off my own bat —there are plenty of people out there making them.

  [Source]

  On the hon. Gentleman’s point about the objective of decarbonisation, we are not going to get there at all if we lose the public—if the lights start browning out or going out, and we find that we cannot meet demand. To some extent, we are piling up that demand by decarbonising transport and other parts of the system, including decarbonising building heating through heat pumps. The demand for electricity will rise, but our capacity to produce it reliably at all hours and in all conditions is being reduced.

  [Source]

• 17 Jul 2024: Debate on the Address

  16:48

  Despite what the Prime Minister tries to insist is his programme, it is still dominated by the short-term tactics of gaining power and retaining it. We heard that in his jibes at the Conservative party rather than addressing the fundamental challenges that threaten our national survival—and I put it at no less than that. What are those challenges? They can be summarised as the six big Ds: debt; digitisation, which is transforming the way we live our lives; decarbonisation; deglobalisation, which has thrown globalisation into reverse as a result of the pandemic and rising international tensions; demographics, which are afflicting every OECD country; and defence.

  One of the findings of the Liaison Committee’s report on strategic thinking in government is that long-term strategy can be truly sustained only if it lasts across successive Parliaments and periodic changes in government. What comes to mind includes continuous at-sea deterrence, the counter-terrorism strategy, the operation of GCHQ and indeed the survival and continuation of the national health service and the achievement of net zero.

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• 2 May 2024: National Grid: Pylons

  13:16

  but none of those three claims applies to Tarchon. The ESO report found that Tarchon will not increase UK electricity security even in the most extreme case and will not help us to achieve net zero. In fact, our exports reduce Germany’s carbon emissions but put ours up, because we continue to rely on fossil fuels to keep the lights on in London.

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• 13 Jul 2023: Illicit Finance: War in Ukraine

  13:46

  So this motion is an important message. It is also a signal to our own public about how we are inviting our own voters to regard the Russian aggression. Our news channels and politics are cluttered with trivia, but also with any number of urgent issues that are also existential threats—not least, climate change and the race to net zero. But we need to convey an ugly truth: war, and the threat of war, displaces every other threat by its immediacy. If the globe, by neglect, cascades into the chaos and waste of increasing state-on-state warfare, with all its death and destruction, and economic and trade disruption, the net zero target will be just another casualty. So our democracy, and democracy around the world, must not fail this test.

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• 9 Nov 2022: Levelling Up Rural Britain

  17:20

  The main point, however, is that the changing nature of life in rural communities is outpacing the ability of our relevant institutions and policy processes to adapt and stay fit for purpose. Rural areas need a responsive, adaptable policy making and strategy process to handle the complexity caused by a combination of the increasingly rapid and profound changes in the wider world and the competing demands that we place on our countryside. These include the need to optimise food production, improve food security, reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, increase carbon sequestration, adapt to cope with climate change threats such as drought and flooding, enhance the wellbeing of the whole UK population by improving leisure and supporting access to the countryside, and improve conditions for wildlife and biodiversity, leaving a better natural environment and landscape for future generations.

  [Source]

• 19 Jul 2022: New Pylons: East Anglia

  09:34

  East Anglia Green Energy Enablement, or GREEN, is the title of the project that proposes to build a new high-voltage network reinforcement between Norwich, Bramford near Ipswich in Suffolk, and Tilbury on the Essex coast. As an MP, I have never received as many emails from my constituents about a single topic.

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  09:49

  The most difficult thing in the whole process is that not even the Minister for Energy, Clean Growth and Climate Change, my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Greg Hands), is accountable for what is being decided; he will tell us, “This is the framework and this is what we have to stick to.” He will then tell us that there is going to be a new proposal for a different regime that would arrive at different outcomes, but that is not going to affect this consultation, and we will be left with decisions being forced down corralled pathways by an outdated regulatory and planning framework.

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  09:49

  I could not agree more. We have environmental policies and net zero policies that are costing the earth, even though they are designed to save the earth—they are very important policies and we put a great deal of money into them—and yet we have other policies that despoil the environment and communities. The damage they do is not costed into the proposals.

  Dare I mention the words “judicial review”? If my constituents go for a judicial review—they are very well funded and well organised, and we are backing them—how many years will that hold up the proposal? Would it not be better for the Government to cut through and say we should go for an offshore grid, which has public support and which people recognise will help us to achieve our net zero targets more quickly and protect the environment and communities? That is what we should do.

  [Source]

• 18 May 2022: Achieving Economic Growth

  15:00

  At least the United Kingdom can produce some of our own gas and oil and can continue to expand renewables, but why are we pumping our surplus gas out to Europe this warm spring to fill EU storage capacity, when we should be filling our own? The Government shut it down, and we need to reopen our gas storage capacity as quickly as possible. I fervently hope that we can achieve net zero by 2050 without excessive cost. The Government are right to see gas as the essential transition fuel, but why import gas when we can produce our own more cheaply?

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• 15 Mar 2022: Shale Gas Production

  12:50

  I support what my right hon. Friend is saying about the need for more renewables and for nuclear. We all support the objective of net zero by 2050, but we are now in a gas supply crisis. The Government insist that we are in a European market; Europe is heavily dependent on Russia. We need to produce as much gas as we can. It is a simple question: is shale an option for the Government in the immediate term, or not? That is what we need to know; otherwise, the wells will be concreted over, which the Government said they do not want.

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• 21 Oct 2021: COP26: Limiting Global Temperature Rises

  I do not agree with all the hon. Lady’s figures, but if hon. Members watch the video that I produced just before the conference—if people google “Bernard Jenkin COP debate YouTube”, they will find the 11-minute video that I launched about climate change—they will see that she almost understates the perilous future that humanity faces on the present projections. The IPCC’s midpoint projections show that we are planning, as a race, to put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere between now and the end of this century than in the whole of human history so far. That is completely unacceptable, but that is the current trend. We have to change that.

  [Source]

• 10 Mar 2021: COP26

  17:44

  It is a great pleasure to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell). My immediate priority is to ensure that the Government have the wherewithal to deliver this. They have many key priorities at the moment, not least the recovery from covid, economic rebuilding, consolidating Brexit and establishing the UK’s new place in global affairs, but what could be more important to that fourth priority than COP26, which represents such a critical opportunity for the world to address the increasingly severe impacts of the climate crisis? The hon. Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones), the Chair of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee, described it as a “crucial milestone”, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne) said:

  The UK has often taken the lead on climate issues, and this presidency is a chance to push for ambitious commitments from partners across the globe. I personally favour the idea of a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty, embodying treaty commitments to limit fossil fuels coming out of the ground or to bind states to offsetting carbon capture and storage. We already have a good record on that in our own country, and it is important that our own policies reinforce the UK’s commitment to this work. Examples include our commitments to international marine reserves, which promote carbon capture; to agricultural reform and rewilding; to our net zero target; and to insulating homes and reducing carbon emissions from transport. Incidentally, we are going to have one of the biggest hydrogen production green energy hubs in Essex, at the new freeport that was announced last week.

  The key to success in the past has been the significant effort and resources expended on conferences like these, long before the conference itself. I was reminded by my hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat), the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, a little while ago that the French employed a former Prime Minister, Laurent Fabius, and he had 12 months and 200 diplomats at his disposal to support the preparation for the Paris COP in 2015. I very much congratulate the COP26 President, my right hon. Friend the Member for Reading West (Alok Sharma), on his appointment and on being given a Cabinet-level role for his COP presidency. He is wholly devoted to it, but it is vital that he has a team with both the resources and the clout, not just to bring our international partners together, involving many Foreign Office resources, but to ensure that the Government Departments work together to deliver on our own targets and our own work.

  I serve on the Public Accounts Committee, and we had to report that the net zero target was not effectively embedded in policy making on a cross-Whitehall basis, so I ask my right hon. Friend: what is the machinery of government that is going to back him up and support his work in the run-up to COP26? We have been expecting a written ministerial statement, and we still expect it. I have been invited to guest on the Environmental Audit Committee tomorrow, and I expect I will press him on this subject then if he does not want to answer that question in the debate this evening. The question is: how much real clout does the machinery of government give the him to deliver this very substantial and defining task for the Government?

  As my right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow pointed out, the Select Committee system in this House is already getting well prepared. Three Chairs of Committees have commented already in this debate, and the Committees are linking their inquiries. The Transport Committee is looking at zero-emission vehicles, the Treasury Committee has been working on decarbonisation and green finance, one of the key summit issues, and the Science and Technology Committee is looking at the potential for hydrogen to meet the UK’s net zero target. The Committees are also demonstrating their flexibility and willingness to collaborate, and I am delighted that they are coming together in this way, effectively to form a kind of informal committee on COP26 to scrutinise the work of the Government in the run-up to the COP summit.

  I have to say that this is also an effort to limit the demands on my right hon. Friend the COP President’s time so that there is no duplication of evidence taking by different Committees. As I say, he is coming before the Environmental Audit Committee tomorrow. I ask him what commitments he can make to the programme of other meetings that I, as Chairman of the Liaison Committee, am setting out and that other Committees are setting out, in order that we have a coherent programme of scrutiny of the work of the Government up to COP26.

  The big challenge here is for the Government to put themselves in the global picture on the most important global summit we are likely to see them undertake in this Parliament; there will be G7s, G8s and NATOs, but nothing is going to cap this. This is the defining COP summit that has to crown the achievement of the Paris summit. I very much hope that this will be seen as a British diplomatic success and not as something that other countries have had to sort out for us. My right hon. Friend has an enormous task. I congratulate him again on his appointment and wish him all the very best. He should come to the Select Committees, perhaps privately, if he needs us to add pressure in order to ensure that he can deliver the task that the Prime Minister has given him.

  [Source]

• 16 Dec 2020: Border Carbon Adjustment Tariffs and Decarbonisation

  17:58

  My right hon. Friend has said something that I regard as significant. Yes, we are going to try to achieve a multilateral approach at COP26, but if we do not succeed, we will consider a more unilateral approach. I am bound to say at this particular juncture, when the term “level playing field” is so commonly spoken about in respect of a certain negotiation, that it would surely be a distortion of international competition for some countries to be doing their best to deal with climate change and for other countries to be exploiting those efforts. If that is not a distortion of genuine free trade, I do not know what is. I think that the unilateral approach is justified.

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• 26 Oct 2015: Finance Bill

  The group of amendments also addresses the renewables obligation incentives and seeks to adjust the feed-in tariff regime. Why are we able to reduce taxation on renewable energy products to only 5%? It is because of the European Union. Why could the previous Labour Government not abolish VAT on fuel, which they said they wanted to do after it had been applied by the Major Administration? It is because of the European Union.

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• 1 Mar 2010: Defence

  The key to a successful 2010 SDR will be a new UK strategic concept, which must embrace the whole panoply of policy—economic stability and trade policy, the future of the EU, NATO and the national security strategy, energy security, climate change and cyber-warfare. It is from those considerations that foreign policy and the SDR must flow. The UK has never institutionalised strategy in that way, but other countries, such as the US, France and Israel do so. It is time that we did so, too.

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See all Parliamentary Speeches Mentioning Climate