Energy for All

Transcription

>> And thank you very much for coming and spending your lunchtime at one of the UCL Lunchtime Lectures. That's who I am. And my subject today is, I think, a pretty important subject: Sustainable Energy for All and the Prospects for Achieving It. If any of you read the newspapers, you will be aware that energy in the UK at the moment is a headline issue with an energy bill having managed to split the Coalition Government and the Conservative Party more or less in two. So, it's a very topical lecture. My expertise is largely in energy issues and resource and environment issue as they apply mainly to developed countries, industrial countries. But, as we will see, the Sustainable Energy for All agenda is mainly about sustainable energy for those in the world who do not yet have access to modern energy services. So, this lecture was arranged with this title because 2012 is the UN International Year of Sustainable Energy for All. That's what battle to read Sustainable Energy for All. And I thought I'd just start with a little bit of audience participation and ask you, how many of you knew that [Silence] apart from coming to this lecture? Not many. And that, unfortunately, is part of the problem with these International UN Years. Not lots of people know about them. But it's a huge issue. 1.3 billion people have no access to electricity. In a world of about 7 billion people, 2.7 billion people lack clean cooking facilities with huge health problems so that causes -- and what I'm going to talk about today is not only is it possible to make modern energy services available to all, but is it possible to make sustainable modern energy services available to all? But is it possible to make sustainable modern energy services available to all. And particularly without emitting so much greenhouse gas that we forfeit climate stability in the search for sustainable energy for all. This is a graph that comes from the UN Sustainable Energy for All Document. And you can see the scale of the challenge. We are now at 2012 and you can see that at the moment the vast majority of the world's energy is supplied by gas, oil, and coal, a little bit of nuclear, red at the top, and then a small amount of yellow, new renewables. That's wind largely. And old kinds of renewables in the green. And the projection for, were the world to continue in the future as it has in the past, I don't believe it will, and so I won't -- I don't call diagrams like this business as usual because I think it's quite inconceivable that we will use as much energy as in the top line, but that's the projection. If all those 1.3 billion people who haven't got electricity and the others who haven't got access to clean cooking energy, if they all get electricity and other forms of energy and use it the way we do, that will be the amount of energy that's used. And, of course, climate stability will go straight out of the window. We'll be moving into a six degree warmer world with all the disruption, death, and destruction that that will cause. So, what might Sustainable Energy for All then be? And you can see that there are two enormous hopes. There's the light grey area at the top which is energy efficiency, energy conservation, the ability to deliver energy services that people want with much less use of energy. And second, an enormous expansion of the yellow, of, of the yellow area, the new renewables, and a corresponding contraction of the blue, red, and black areas. So that the use of coal then becomes very much a minority energy source, whereas today, as you can see, it's one of the major sources. That depends if we'd also have carbon capture and storage, you would see then that a lot of the carbon dioxide emissions from the use of those fossil fuels would be captured and would be put underground so that we could have an energy profile like that where we would be going to very considerably higher energy demands than at present, up to about 800 exajoules which is the right hand axis, but with practically no carbon emissions or with at least about half the carbon emissions that we have now despite the fact that energy use will about have doubled. So that's the challenge. It's a challenge I would argue mainly for countries like ours, this country, because the one thing that you can't complain about is the 1.3 billion people who haven't got electricity wanting access to it. And it is up to countries like ours to develop the means of electricity generation that do not produce carbon emissions, and then to make sure that these technologies are available worldwide to those people in countries that need them, and that's largely going to be what I'm talking about today. But to start with developing countries, it's quite clear what the trajectory of their energy use needs to be. They will need to move from traditional to modern biomass. By traditional biomass I mean the unsustainable harvesting of wood from trees, very often carrying it, carrying it very long distances and then burning it in very inefficient stoves, often indoors, which then causes huge health problems, especially to the women who are involved in that, but also, obviously, to the children. What do I mean by modern biomass? I mean the burning of crops that are particularly grown or trees that are grown and harvested sustainably and burned much more efficiently. From inefficient to efficient cooking stoves; I've already talked about that. From unsustainable to sustainable use of land and biomass and moving away from simply cutting forests down and to using that land and those trees sustainably. The use of decentralized solar energy -- many of you who are familiar with African countries in particular will know that there is now absolutely no ambition to install landline telephone systems which were inaccessible to the great majority of rural people anyway because of the almost universal coverage of mobile phones and their very wide ownership, even in countries with rather low per capita incomes. So that kind of is a model the way telecommunications has developed. And the rate at which the prices of photovoltaic cells are coming down suggests that off-grid self-sufficient photovoltaic sources with electricity storage for when the sun isn't shining will be not only cleaner in terms of carbon emissions but more competitive than installing a grid and then hooking people up in the way that industrial countries have done it. So, let's move on to the energy policy objectives that I'm much more familiar with because they're the ones that my government here is struggling with as, indeed, are other European countries and the US and other OECD countries generally. And we've got three big challenges ahead of us for our energy system. A transition to a low carbon energy system; which involves cutting carbon emissions by some 80% by 2050, which is now something that is enshrined in law in this country. So that is a legal obligation on the government of the day to move in that direction. Increased security and resilience of the energy system, given that fossil fuels are expensive. The prices are volatile. No one can guess what the prices are going to do in the future. Many economists have guessed that in the past and got it wrong. But what we, I think, can be absolutely certain about is that they will be volatile and that that will not be good for fossil fuel importing countries. And then, finally, we've got to try to do this cost effectively. We've got to try to keep energy affordable for all the competitiveness and social justice reasons that we understand because there's no shortage of poor people in our own country as well as, obviously, in other countries. Investments required are huge and we'll have a look at some numbers towards the end of this lecture. And they've got to be the right investments. It's no good putting in power stations which 20 years down the line are going to be inappropriate or unusable. And practically every aspect of the energy system will need to change in order to meet those objectives. Electricity will have to move from having something like 500 grams per kilowatt hour of carbon dioxide to having less than a tenth of that by 2030, less than about 50. And by 2050 it will have to be essentially decarbonized completely through one of the mass implementation of one of four main options for decarbonization: large scale renewables; small scale renewables; nuclear power; and carbon-capturing storage. Enormous challenges with each of those technology classes, some of which I've listed there. Challenges of cost. Sometimes even challenges -- we don't know whether carbon capture and storage, for example, will even work at a commercial scale. And I'm sure we're all familiar with the challenges of deploying renewables and scale. So that's the supply side. And if we look at the demand side, the challenges there are just as daunting. We will need to move to a situation when buildings in a country like the UK effectively emit no carbon at all because they're very energy efficient, in a way that they are not at the moment, and because they are heated either by zero-carbon electricity by then or by some bio-energy district heating or something like that. The grid will look completely different, from having been the kind of electricity grid where large-scale remote power generators send electricity down the line and consumers don't understand anything about it, they don't know how to measure it, they don't know what they're paying for, they just use it and expect it to be there when they turn the switch on. There will be a much more interactive group making full use of information and communication technologies to smooth the power demand throughout the day and to ensure that the grid can be managed much more easily when it has a large proportion of variable renewable energy because the wind doesn't blow all the time and the sun doesn't shine all the time, when it has much more variable energy on the grid. That will require a completely different network design and a quite different wholesale power market which will need to be redesigned. And the technologies with which we use energy will be quite different. Practically all of you will have in your homes gas-fired boilers for your hot water and central heating. Not in 2050 if we're going to reduce carbon emissions. We will have to have a completely different system of home heating and it won't include individual gas boilers. Similarly, vehicles, the internal combustion engine, that iconic technology of the 20th century, will either be running largely on fossil fuels on -- I'm sorry, on bio-fuels, and the opportunity for that in a world of 9 billion people who are wanting to eat is likely to be slightly limited, or there'll be electric or fuel-cell vehicles running on either electricity or a variety of different non-carbon or low-carbon fuels. And you can imagine the enormous changes in the industries of the world that will be needed to change something as fundamental to our civilization as the internal combustion engine has been. And then I mentioned bio-fuels. That's only one form of bio-energy, of course. Some of you will be aware that at the moment the largest coal-fired power station in this country is converting two of its large generating sets to run on bio-energy which entails shoveling enormous quantities of wood pellets into it to substitute for the coal. Why would you want to do that? Because in growing trees they suck carbon dioxide out of the air so that when you burn them and you put the carbon dioxide back in the air, effectively it's a low carbon fuel. They're accounted as being zero-carbon fuel and, depending on what happens to the soil when you were growing them and the way in which they're grown, that may or may not be true. But, at any rate, there will be lower carbon emissions in net terms than burning coal. But, of course, if we start using a lot of our land for growing crops like trees or certain kinds of grasses for energy, then there's only a finite amount of land. A lot of that land is necessary for biodiversity. A lot of that land is necessary for growing food. And you can imagine that in countries where already there is conflict over land, adding a major new use of land that can earn foreign exchange but serves people far away in rich countries, could lead to enormous social problems at home, particularly affecting poor people. And that leads us to those social issues of power, livelihoods, ownership, and control which always involve land use, but especially in predominantly agrarian and agricultural societies. And then we've got internationalization, the globalization that's occurred over the last 50 years. We have global technologies and global technology development. And countries are very keen cooperating developing technologies until they make a technological breakthrough, and then they're very keen to keep those technological developments to themselves so that they can gain competitive advantage from their economies from them. Then there is an expectation the rich countries, when they develop these technologies, will somehow make them available to poorer countries on favorable terms. That's part of the deal in the climate change, the climate change agreement which countries are finding such difficulty in coming to. But it will be a crucial part of achieving sustainable energy for all. There are very important trade issues, not just to do with fossil fuels, and we know how problematic trading fossil fuels can be, but to do with bio-energy which will become a major new internationally traded commodity, is already in fact. And then the new market of carbon. And the perception that perhaps countries that are taking strong action on the climate change, like the UK, like some other European countries, like the European Union as a whole, will need to impose border taxes on the imports from countries that are not doing that in order to level the global playing field for international commerce, generally. Huge political issues involved in that. And then something of particular concern to Europe, but not just to Europe, is the issue of the regional integration of energy. If you've got large quantities of intermittent energy, then there are obviously important issues to do with grid balancing, and you're more likely to be able to balance the grid cost-effectively if you can combine, say, the wind in Norway with the sun in Spain, and stick them together on the same electricity grid. But to do that, obviously, you have to have interconnection and transmission capacity. That's quite expensive. And you have to have, just as importantly, institutions at that whole European level that can regulate and manage a much larger grid. Those who are interested in reading about that, the European Union has produced a European Roadmap 2050 to show how such an integrated energy system in Europe might come about. So those are the options and choices, and countries will wrestle with them, given that they're all uncertain and they're all difficult and most of them are very expensive. Countries will wrestle with these in their own way. And we will make different choices depending on our culture, our resource endowments and various international relationships. These choices are political choices. Industries, of course, are fond of arguing that we need some particular kind of technology, because if they can persuade governments of that they can probably get some subsidies out of those governments, and very often they're successful. But if we look at different countries, even in Europe we can see that there's Germany that is determined to move in this direction with only energy efficiency and renewables. It's turned its back categorically on nuclear power and has said that it will only use fossil fuels as a kind of transitional fuel, whereas a country like the UK, we are about to, if the government has its way, about to enter a new phase of investment in nuclear power, and there's enormous debate about whether there's a long term role for gas on the UK Energy System or not. So even with countries as similar in many ways as the UK and Germany, there is scope for absolutely radical, radically different energy choices even though we have the same carbon dioxide targets, both of us seeking to reduce them by 80% by 2050. The options will play out differently and there's huge uncertainty about how they'll play out. The economic and political consequences of making the wrong choices are enormous. And there's going to be a balance between the way in which governments leave these things to the hands of "the market" and allow market players to make these investments and the extent to which they feel they need to guide that process. And I've already mentioned the importance of the demand side, the importance of the up -- that curve not going all the way up the way it might, but of using energy much more efficiently. So I'm going to scoot through really the next 30 or 40 years. I won't be around to see much of this development between 2010 and 2050. It's a bit of a pity. But many of you will be, and it will be fascinating because the extent to which the choices that are made about your energy system over this period will, to a very large extent, determine the kinds of lives that you are able to lead. Energy being absolutely fundamental to the provision of the kinds of societies that we live in now and that will be developed in the future. So, over the next few years to 2020, which I probably will be around to see, we've got to answer some pretty important questions. Does CCS work? How much beyond 20% renewables is the EU going to go? Which countries will go for nuclear? Will it be just for the UK? Will China and some of the big emerging economies -- will they also build up big nuclear program? And what will be the implications of that for proliferation of nuclear materials, for example, and all sorts of other issues? How much distributed generation will there be? To what extent will we move away from the centralized model of power generation which has existed really every since electricity was first made available on a mass scale? Are we really going to save lots of energy? Are we going to make our houses more energy efficient? Are we going to discover how to do that? To what extent will we move away from the internal combustion engine to electric vehicles or fuel-cell vehicles? How will the smart grid turn out? If the government has its way, by 2019, in all of our homes there will be something called a smart grid. Will it work? Will we know how to use a smart grid? Will we be smart? Will we be as smart as the grid, as smart as the meter, in terms of our energy use? All these questions currently we, we, we don't know. So, beyond 2020, we've got to start rolling this out at scale. By 2020, we will probably of had to have invested over a hundred billion in new power stations. Beyond 2020, there's another hundred billion to go in the large-scale rollout of these different technologies, the establishment of these patents. So that by 2030, the direction of travel is pretty clear. The companies that are winners in this game know they're going to be winners. They will have been investing very large sums of money to completely restructure the energy infrastructure of this country and, of course, in other countries that don't have an energy infrastructure yet of the same kind, building a quite different energy infrastructure to give sustainable energy for all. What will this cost? Well, very large sums of money. So this table is in billions of dollars, and you can see that at present if you add up everything that we spend on research, development, demonstration, new markets formation, and present investment, we spend about 1.25 trillion, which is 1250 billion dollars. We need to more or less double that if we are to achieve sustainable energy for all. The good news is that there's no shortage of money out there, and that investment is certainly findable, but it won't happen by itself. It will need to be suitably incentivized if it's private money. Private investors don't invest in things that don't make money, so there will have to be incentives for them to invest in those things. And, if it's public money, then governments will need to borrow rather more wisely than they have in the past. What will it cost? Second slide. You may be surprised that I should ask that second question because I've just put up a slide saying what will it cost? But, the word "cost" in economics is a very complicated and difficult word despite the fact that it's only four letters. Because one person's cost is another person's profit. And if all that money was invested in the electricity and other energy sit -- parts of the energy system, then we would suddenly find that with enormous innervation in society, enormous new business activities, lots of new firms spring up making money, employing people, etc., and the use of the word "cost," as I'm using it on this side, is what would that do to the economy as a whole? Would it stimulate GDP growth, economic growth, or would it reduce it? And that is a very, very difficult question, to which there are two possible answers. The possible answer that I think most people agree on is that it wouldn't change it very much. So that's the first issue. Unless climate damages in the future are going to be much, much worse by 2050 than climate models currently suggest. They suggest that the real damage from climate change will come in the years after 2050, but we can't be sure of that anymore when we see how fast the Arctic is melting and how conservative the climate scientists have been in the past in their estimates of the speed of climate change. So that's a major caveat. And as with everything else, the economists don't agree about the answer to this question, about what will this do to GDP, to the macro economy. There are optimists, broadly people like me, who think that costs are really investments; that there's considerable opportunity for energy efficiency which will actually save money; that a number of low carbon technologies are pretty well competitive with their fossil fuel equivalents, and if energy prices go on rising, if fossil fuel prices go on rising, they will become competitive and technical change will make them more competitive. Even if fossil fuel prices don't go on rising, there's good empirical evidence that suggests that this is what happens to new technologies which we call learning curves. And then there's the issue that climate change policies may stimulate innovation. It may bring into being whole new classes of technologies such as a smart grid, which we don't even -- can't even imagine the kinds of goods and services that that might make available to us, but which could be a new source of economic growth. And then there's the whole uncertainty about what's going to happen to fossil fuel prices. If we were comparing the costs of the low carbon transition with fossil fuel prices 10 years ago, when they were a little more than $10 a barrel, the costs of the low carbon transition would obviously be very different to what they are now when oil prices are about $113 in a barrel. And will they be $200 a barrel in 2025? We don't know. But clearly they'll be volatile and the one thing we know about renewables is once we've made those investments, they're effectively free. And they're free over the long term. So there's all sorts of ways in which you can phrase these issues. Of course there are pessimists. There are people who seem to be largely inhabiting the Treasury in our country at the moment, who think those are going to be terribly expensive, it's going to act as a break on growth, and they're, therefore, very unwilling to make those investments. That's one model that shows -- it's a model of all the different computer runs of their -- of a low-carbon transition either for the United States or for the world. So, on the X act -- on the Y Axis, you're got the effect on GDP. On the X Axis you've got the percentage of carbon reduction achieved. And you can see that most of the models think that to reduce carbon emissions by about 70% would cost between one and three percent of GDP. In other words, there's a cost. But, that graph assumes that there are no damages from climate change because the models that compute these costs don't have any damages from climate change. But if I believe there weren't going to be any damages from climate change, then I'd be doing something else with my life because it seems to me that this is what this agenda is all about. There was a very low -- interesting modeling exercise carried out by the United Nations Environment Program just last year where they factored in the damages from climate change, insofar as we can guess what they will be, and it is still largely guess work. And you will see that the red line there is the business-as-usual line with no special effort to reduce carbon emissions or the destruction of other forms of natural capital. And the green line is the line where we put 2% of our global GDP into low-carbon technologies, and that's sustainable energy for all, and into other investments: forests and water and the other kinds of natural resources that are likely to be in short supply. And you can see that right about 2017 the green growth line is above the red growth line and stays there. On the Y Axis here we've got the growth rate, so you can see it's currently -- or, or right about 2010 it was currently 3% globally. So that's how to interpret that. And then we see that timeline running forwards. So, conclusions before we have some questions. It's quite clear to me that we won't have the kind of economic growth that we know about and that we've experienced over the last 50 or so years unless we get our environmental act together. That's what the word "unsustainable" means. I think it is true that there is no low-cost, high-carbon future. There is a medium-cost, low-carbon future. Or there is a very high-cost, high-carbon future where those high costs come from climate damages. The provision of sustainable energy for all will be an important part of this transition for all countries, and all countries need to play a role. I've spent most time on the kind of changes that I think are necessary in countries like this one. But, obviously, the changes in countries, poorer countries, and the energy infrastructures that they now put in place are going to be critical to see whether sustainable energy for all is achieved. If we do that we may get this thing called green growth which will be resource-efficient. It will probably employ more people because it will employ less fossil energy. And its level will depend on the degree of innovation that we're able to stimulate. The relatively high growth countries will be those that have developed these industries and technologies. I spend an increasing amount of my time in Asia because the emerging and industrial countries of Asia seem to have got this message to a far greater extent than, say, any country outside Germany in the European Union. So, Taiwan, Korea, China, and Japan, with their different stages of economic development, are all absolutely going down this road because that's where they think the export markets of the future are to be found. Huge investments will be needed. Incentivizing and deploying those will require high carbon prices. And high carbon prices which make things like petrol and diesel, things like gas in our homes more expensive -- you can imagine that that's a difficult thing for politicians to sell, so it's going to be a politically challenging move, but I believe absolutely essential. But we can see the kinds of arguments that are playing out in Parliament at the moment. So I'll finish there and very happy to take some questions if you have any. [ Applause ] >> Thank you very much. Now that we've got one of the most ungreenest governments ever, despite their pre-election claims, what on earth can we do when they're going in total diverse direction from what you're recommending or advising we may have to do? >> Well, that's obviously a very good and topical question. I don't think it's quite right in the sense that I don't think they are yet going in the opposite direction. There is still a Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change who says that he's determined that we should get the low-carbon transition in this country. It's obviously clear he's coming up against a lot of opposition from the Chancellor, from the Treasury, from a number of conservative MPs, but there are also conservative MPs, too, who support what they, what the Secretary of State for Energy is doing. The politics of the Conservative Party is not something I've been particularly good at in my academic life, so I wouldn't pretend to know how that's going to play out. But I think the one thing we can be sure is that this is -- this whole agenda in whichever country we're talking about, is politically very difficult and it will be an enormous political battle. That battle was fought and largely won in Germany in the, in the later years of the 1990's. It was fought and largely won in Australia where one Prime Minister fell, one leader of the opposition fell, and the current Prime Minister has just said they're going to join the new Kyoto, the Kyoto Protocol Phase II, and they're putting in place carbon taxes and that will move into an emissions trading scheme. This is politically a very, very difficult agenda. And the UK is currently experiencing the kind of political conflict which other countries have experienced and which other countries will experience as they tackle it. And I think it's up to us to get stuck in, in any way that we feel we can, on the side that we feel is important should win. And I think you probably know which side I think that is. >> Thank you. And so if we assume current exponential rates of growth in terms of consumption and assume that the developing world will continue to do the same, certain experts like David McKie say that there -- even after the efficiency savings, even after the, the use of renewables, whatever we can throw at it, it won't be enough. We still won't get to the -- you know, we'll still be using more energy than we really need, and then -- so, my question is, to what extent do you think that we'll be either forced into, or by choice, accept lower amounts of consumption, or at least lower rates of growth in our consumption? >> Well, most of us don't care whether we consume energy or not. And this is where energy economists get a bit, a bit difficult to understand sometimes. But it's a very important point. What we're interested in is energy it services. We're interested in being warm in our homes. We don't care whether being warm in our homes means that we consume lots of energy or little bits of energy, or we didn't when energy was terribly cheap. Now that energy's more expensive than it used to be, we are starting to care about the bills. But actually we don't care. We just want to be warm. And we want the homes to be well ventilated and healthy at the same time. Now, they were well ventilated and healthy in the past by having huge drafts blowing through them the whole time, as I'm sure you've noticed in the places that you live. That's got to stop. We've got to build smart homes that are well ventilated, but also very well insulated, so that they can keep us warm with very little energy use. That's relatively easy to do now with new homes, and in -- the regulations on building new homes say that homes will have to be zero-carbon by 2016 which is pretty soon. And the Germans and the Austrians are building very large numbers of these so-called passive houses now. So we know we can do it with new homes. We know we can also do it with refurbishing homes, even drafty old Victorian homes such as the one that I live in. But it's pretty expensive and it's actually quite difficult. And most of our building industry hasn't got a clue how to do it, and if they try to do it, they normally do it badly. So that is a huge problem for everyone. The government's green deal is trying to sort out that problem. In my view it's not going to manage it. We'll need to do a lot more than they're currently trying to put in place. But it's a start. And the financial mechanisms around the green deal are exactly what's required. But it will take quite a lot more than the government is currently throwing at it in order for that to work. So that's just one example. I can have exactly the same arguments on transport. We actually want to get from A to B. There are much more complicated issue to do with status around transport, and the people just don't buy cars in order to get from A to B. Otherwise we wouldn't see the huge range and variety and power and style of cars that we see out there. Cars do lots of other things for people apart from getting to A -- from A to B. But there's no reason why electric and fuel-cell vehicles shouldn't have -- play that role. Probably we'll have far fewer cars in cities because that's the way things seem to be going, and that's very good. Obviously it makes cities much safer places, much healthier places. But people will still travel about quite a lot. But the amount of energy that they use and the kind of energy that they use will be very different, because both battery electric vehicles and fuel-cell electric vehicles are about twice as efficient as internal combustion engines, so that we could afford to use that amount of energy and go twice as far. And that's what our models show when we start to implement these things. [ Silence ] >> Paul, what role, if any, do you foresee for shale gas? I'm asking because shale gas is considered to be a game-changer in the US because it is anticipated to satisfy both goals: energy security and climate change mitigation targets. >> Yeah. Well, there's as always a difficult question when you've got a minute and a half to answer it because there's going to be a lecture in here at 2 o'clock sharp. But shale gas has been a game-changer in the US and in the US it will probably be good for carbon emissions because it will substitute largely for coal. It's very unclear the amount of shale gas that there is in Europe, and the amount of shale gas that could be extracted commercially in a country like the UK. A Conservative MP was telling me the other day that if you think you have problems putting up an onshore wind turbine in the UK, you try telling people in the Home Counties that you're going to put an oil rig at the bottom of their garden. So, the political opposition to shale gas in the much more densely populated countries of Europe is going to be far greater than it was in the US where there are huge wide-open spaces with far fewer people. And the existence of shale gas at commercial levels is still very, very unsure. So it's possible that it could be a game-changer. I think it's most unlikely to be a game-changer in Europe in the same way. But how -- what it might do is break the link between oil and gas prices, so that we got access to much cheaper gas as the Americans now have. The American gas price is about half what it is in Europe because of shale gas. And if that were to free up gas markets globally, or indeed, create a global gas market, then indeed that might be a game-changer globally for gas prices which, of course, would make the low-carbon transition much more expensive and politically more difficult. And that's what we're starting to see play out in our politics. The Chancellor is arguing for a new dash for gas because he has bought the argument that gas is going to be cheap in the future. Deck is arguing the Department of Energy and Climate Change, but they're not sure it is going to be cheap in the future. And what we know is that we don't know who's right on that. But, if there was to be a new dash for gas, we would have to repeal the Climate Change Act because we would have no chance of meeting our carbon targets. And that's the question that I would like to ask the Chancellor next time I come across him. Is he in favor of repealing the Climate Change Act because that's the logical outcome of his position, and at the moment he's not been prepared to go as far as that. Thank you very much for coming. I'm afraid [applause] we're going to have to stop. [ Applause ]