Professor Peter Thorne:

Just to give an idea of timescales of international processes, in the past year they have just adopted the GWP100 numbers from the IPCC assessment report 5, despite assessment report 6 coming out in the past year. I do not expect things to change very quickly at international or EU reporting level, which is a fundamental level.

On the Deputy's question on calculations of GWP, an individual cow or even the herd of a single farm has an absolutely negligible effect. It is when we aggregate it that we see the effect. However, as we have repeatedly stated, there is a difference between fossil methane and biogenic methane. The biogenic methane picks up the carbon from the active component of the carbon cycle, so it does not do very long-term harm. It does harm, relative to not having that emission, for the timeframe that the methane is in the atmosphere, but it does no additional harm afterwards. Fossil methane does harm.

The Deputy made the point that we need to get away from the "them and us" approach and stop finger-pointing at farmers. I absolutely agree. I do not believe for a moment that the agricultural community is deliberately trying to do harm to the environment. Why would they? They rely upon the environment for their jobs. They do not want to leave their farms in a worse state. It is not all down to methane emissions. The vast bulk of the warming to date is down to the burning and extraction of fossil fuels. That is doing harm. That is why we need to look at all sectors and everybody needs to play their part. I will go back to my opening remark. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the real risk is that for 97% of the population who are not farmers, we are making this somebody else's problem. It is not somebody else's problem; it is all of our problem. We need to fundamentally get to net-zero CO2 emissions. Otherwise, it is game over. We are not going to stop the warming at any warming level unless and until we get to net-zero CO2. I ask members and anyone watching the debate not to let a discussion on methane emissions disabuse them of the notion that we must reduce CO2 to net-zero. That is the absolute imperative.