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Geoffrey Cox's Speeches In Parliament Related to Climate

We've found 3 Parliamentary debates in which Geoffrey Cox has spoken about climate-related matters.

Here are the relevant sections of their speeches.

• 3 Dec 2024: Family Farming in Devon

  14:46

  In the meantime, like a slow and steady drumbeat gathering force, behind the ever more implausible rhetoric of support, they see and hear the concrete commitments of this Government. They witness the Government in action, not in words. They see how the Prime Minister at COP29 committed himself to a climate change target—a perfectly reasonable thing, some may argue, but the Climate Change Committee has told him that in committing to that target he will need to reduce the consumption of meat and dairy products by 20% over the coming five years.

  [Source]

• 23 Feb 2022: Food and Farming: Devon and Cornwall

  09:30

  A prosperous and flourishing agriculture in the United Kingdom is in the national interest—I do not imagine that that is a controversial statement in this company. It is not a dispensable or superfluous activity. Recent international events have confirmed, in the most dramatic way, that food production, and more specifically food security, is of increasing national importance and should be a vital Government priority. It does not need much imagination or foresight to see that, for some time now, we have been living through a new and unstable phase of international affairs. The effects of pandemics, wars—threatened and actual—and climate change are thrust upon us with every news bulletin. We cannot take for granted an uninterrupted international supply chain and an endless stream of imports.

  On Monday this week, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence observed that the impact of a Russian invasion in Ukraine—now already in action—would be to remove access to the breadbasket of the world. It would have the most deleterious impacts upon vulnerable states and nations throughout the world. Similarly, the gradual erosion by climate change of fertile and cultivable areas of the world, increasing regional tensions, confronts us with a growing threat to the interest of this country in ensuring a constant and adequate food supply to its people. Perhaps not for a very long time has it been so critical that our domestic agricultural policies—under our own exclusive control again after 45 years—should be got right. That is no doubt why the Government sensibly included a legal duty on Ministers, in devising the financial support schemes, to have regard to the need to encourage the production of food and to report each five years to Parliament on food security.

  [Source]

• 12 Mar 2014: Planning Policy and Wind Turbines (South-West)

  The main planning considerations for wind turbine applications can be found in two primary documents: first, the national planning policy framework; and secondly, the national policy statement on renewable energy infrastructure. There is now a third document, to which I shall come, but my case is that the planning framework for wind turbine applications is still affected by a substantial bias in favour of renewable energy. That is a disappointing concession to have to make, because only last year the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government announced in a written ministerial statement that he was intending to rectify the balance.

  However, at the heart of the planning balance is this central equation: do the benefits of the scheme, particularly the production of electricity from a renewable source, outweigh its harmful impacts? The equation needs only to be stated for the listener to realise that if we are going to have a simple equation of that kind—whether the benefits outweigh the impacts—the answer is going to be influenced by the hierarchy of priorities on either side of the equation. Which is to take precedence? Is it the benefits—the production of renewable energy—or the impact on the landscape? Which, in the planning framework and the documents and policies that affect the decision, takes precedence?

  The moment someone looks at the national planning policy framework, the answer starts to emerge. That document makes it clear that no overall demonstration of need for the development is required. In other words, the developer is not required to prove that his development is needed or to produce evidence that the proposed development will make any material or significant difference to the overall generating needs of the country in relation to renewable energy.

  With so scathing an assessment of the damage to be caused to what the planning inspector described as a valuable landscape, one might assume that it played the decisive and tipping feature in that decision. However, I must report with dismay that the inspector allowed the turbines to be built. Regarding the despoliation of the countryside, he commented that as “some harm” to the character of the landscape is an “inevitable consequence” of renewable energy development, he attached only “moderate weight” to the harm he identified.

  Let us examine what that means. The inspector acknowledged that, up to a radius of 5 km from the three 325-foot wind turbines, there would be serious harm to the quality, visual appearance and amenity of the landscape, yet it is said that that harm must be endured for the sake of renewable energy development, the need for which is unproven, and despite the fact that the Government’s target has already been reached. It is said that the harm would be contained within a 5 km envelope, but how many 300-foot turbines does one have to build, and how many envelopes of 5 km in which the damage on the landscape is serious and severe, before eventually, like blisters appearing on someone’s skin, an area of exquisite landscape is permanently and irredeemably harmed? How many pockets of 5 km of serious harm to the landscape does it take to have an overall cumulative impact that ineradicably alters the fundamental character of the landscape?

  However, the answer that an experienced planner will give someone when confronted with that document is, “Well, it never did.” It was never automatic in any planning decision that the landscape value would be overridden by the need for renewable energy, but there was always an inherent bias in the system towards allowing wind turbine applications, and that inherent bias is not addressed by simply making it clear that the need for renewable energy does not “automatically override” landscape and local concerns, because the planner will simply say, “Well, it never has. We’ve always carried out balancing. It’s just that in that balancing, the hierarchy of values and priorities favours renewable energy.”

  What the July 2013 document needed to say was something along the lines of, “The visual impact on valuable landscapes must be considered to be a priority at least equal to the need for renewable energy.” What the document actually said is entirely otiose; it does not address the fundamental problem. I do not wish to downplay the well-meaning and—I have no doubt—convinced opinion of the Secretary of State that what he did was intended and was in practical effect to make a change. The problem I have is that planning departments throughout the south-west do not interpret it as a change. I can tell this House that, for example, Torridge district council’s planning department does not regard the July 2013 document as effecting any significant or substantial change in the planning equation and—as I have sought to identify—there is already an inherent bias in that planning equation. I submit that we as a Government must attempt to do something about that bias.

  [Source]

  Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the other baleful effects of the proliferation of applications for out-of-scale wind turbines is that it tends to turn people against renewable energy as a whole? As they search for arguments to defend their communities, they immediately start to look at the whole case for cutting carbon emissions and do so from a hostile point of view. That cannot be a good thing for a cause that we would all support.

  [Source]

See all Parliamentary Speeches Mentioning Climate