 I'm very pleased too to come because I've been always very concerned to advance Anglo-Irish relationships. I was the minister who was able, largely by disobeying my ministerial instructions because it was so close to the election in 1997 that I knew I couldn't be overturned when there was the question of the European bubble in order that we would make a common offer for the Kyoto protocol. I felt in a very small way I was able to make a contribution to what I would call reconciliation by making the United Kingdom do more in order that Ireland should need to do less. It seemed to me that this was a very important thing to do because it's the only basis upon which we're going to get international agreement in any case, which is that those who can must do more and those that can't must do as much as they can do. It means that I do actually believe that those who can't do the most have also got to do as much as they can do. One of the problems always in that is that people then tend to think, well, as I've been let off the worst, I don't have the same kind of pressure and I think it's very important for us to recognise that we all of us, big or small, need to take this whole issue seriously. In the world, of course, Ireland and the United Kingdom are not dissimilar. We are small emitters if you compare us with the huge emissions of America or of China. So I'm often asked, why on earth do you bother? The United Kingdom is 2% of the world's emissions and doesn't matter. The answer to that is threefold. The first is my mother's answer, which is you can't leave it to everybody else. You've got to do your bit yourself. There's a sort of basic moral issue. But the second thing is that you really genuinely can't ask other people to do things unless you yourself are doing them. And it is much more difficult for countries which are far poorer than we are, even in Ireland's most unhappy thoughts about itself. You can't compare that with some of these countries that are having to deal with the issue, which you can't ask them to do things unless you are at least doing as much as they are doing proportionately. So there is a second reason. The third thing is this. It's all our climate. What is happening is happening to all of us. I found it fascinating because I intervened in the Australian argument over the carbon tax. Because they hate ponds interfering in their own internal politics, I started off by saying the reason I can interfere and intervene is because you're changing my climate and I'm changing yours, but I'm doing something about it. In that sense, it is a crucial part of what we are trying to do is to show that if we want others to join in, we have to do it. And we have to do it because it's an assertion, too, that this is one planet and it's one atmosphere. And there's no point in doing it without recognising that wherever you do it has an effect upon the whole world. I always remember having an argument with the Danish Minister who was extremely self-opinionated about the wonderful offer and things that Denmark was doing. He happened to be Minister for Environment and Energy. And I said to him, I don't understand what you've just done. I said, you've just made a lot of fuss in India because you've given them a coal-fired power station. And you also made a lot of fuss six months ago in Denmark because you closed your last coal-fired power station. And indeed, that was the coal-fired power station you exported to India. It doesn't matter except the Indians may not run it as efficiently as you were running because they haven't done it for them. You were very efficient at running it. You've actually now, all you've done is to transfer the emissions and you can't take credit for that. It just is the prize example of why we have to take seriously the fact that we're all in this together to use a phrase which has been rather overused. That's exactly where we are. Now, in Britain we have a particularly different system, although it is beginning to be copied elsewhere. The Danes have just taken much the same pattern that we have, and the Mexicans have too. And others, particularly in South America, are now seeking to copy many of the elements in it. And most of you will know all about it, but it may be of particular interest at the moment because of your own search for a climate change act. If I just say what seemed to me to be the central parts of this, the first thing is its independence. The Climate Change Committee is a statutory committee which is outside but reporting to Parliament, and it has to be independent. So the chairman and members are all independent and they can't be sacked for the period in which they are in charge. They can be extended, but that extension as that appointment is really quite carefully balanced. So I was appointed by the Liberal Democrat Minister for Climate Change and Energy, the Labour First Minister of Wales, the Scottish Nationalist First Minister of Scotland, and the Protestant Unionist First Minister of Northern Ireland. And they got a Catholic Conservative, so it was a pretty independent structure that they ended up with. But it's a very important mechanism because it's impossible to imagine in Britain in which they would all be of the same party. So it doesn't make sure that you have to be acceptable because of course you have to be because your period of time will automatically run over other parties. So I have to be acceptable to the Labour Party because if the Labour Party won, I'd have to deal with it in exactly the same way. So one has to be independent. I actually sit as a Conservative member of the House of Lords because I've been a Conservative minister and member for rather a long time. And I thought that to pretend that I'd suddenly become cross-bench over would look rather silly. But it doesn't mean to say that I haven't always been rather independent on this issue and one is accepted as such. And the committee is entirely filled with people who are scientists or economists in other's Nobel Prize winners and people are real standing independently. None of them are there out of office. They are all there out of personal scientific ability or economics. It's very important to have economists. So we've got the head of the Grantham Institute from the London School of Economics and we have the director general of the Institute of Physical Studies. So that's important because we must show people that we actually understand the price of what we're asking, the costs of things, how you get to the most cost-effective end. So that's vital. And then we have a range of climatologists and people whose expertise lies in the area of climate and who would be recognised internationally. There's no doubt that if you think of former adviser to the British government, Australian born, the now no longer but historically head of a whole series of international organisations who is my most assiduous and difficult member because he's never let me off the hook. He says really. And then you look at somebody like Sam Fankhousa, who's Swiss, but he's known internationally as a great economist. And then you listen to my Scottish member who's not there because he's Scottish, but because he is probably the foremost climate change expert. Then I've got a fantastic vice chairman who is a woman of enormous standing, but she also is the world expert on aeronautics and not only aviation but also automobiles. And she knows more about the internal combustion engine than anybody else. It's rather indecently knowledgeable about what goes on under the bonnet. But all this gives enormous strength to what we say because the one thing you can't say about us is that we are politically motivated. You can't say about us that we are ignorant. And we have a very good secretariat of 30 plus people who work on both adaptation and mitigation. We have a separate chairman for adaptation, Lord Krebs, again somebody of natural scientists of very considerable worth, master of Jesus College Oxford. And he looks after that in order to make the point that we are both in the business of mitigation and of adaptation. And he's just reported last week on the next stage of pointing out how the government has failed to meet the realities of flood prevention as a result of climate change. Now this is a good example of the fact that we are not saying to the government things that they particularly like hearing. And that's why the independence is so important because we say it as nicely as we can. But we lay down the budgets, five-year budgets. So this is what this latest report has been. It's been the in-depth view of what has happened over those five years. And the headline is simply that we have met our targets in those five years. That we congratulate the government because we've more than met them of not banking that improvement towards the next budget. But writing that off so that we haven't made it easier for ourselves in the future. But that we have to accept that the trajectory is still not good enough to meet our fourth carbon budget, which is the last of the budgets that we've done so far. We start on the fifth next year and that takes us to 2027. And of course that's necessary because if we're going to reach our statutory target, which we have to and we're responsible for making the most cost effective route to that. If we're going to meet that target in 2050 then we do have to have a measured route to it. And that's what these budgets are about, creating a measured route to delivering. And of course it does help a great deal when you know that you've got an act which is almost impossible to repeal. It passed the House of Commons by the biggest majority that any act has ever had. Eight against it. They're still there. They're still against it. Or imagine what it was. But of course like motherhood and apple pie it's all very well until you start doing the things then you'll find that they're all in favour of it in principle. But any of the particularities of course you can very soon find a good reason for not doing that. But there's a very great strength to have an independent committee guaranteed by an act which is extremely difficult to repeal. Indeed almost impossible to imagine a parliamentary situation in which you could repeal it. And therefore you do have the ability to overcome the real problem of all democratic countries which is the short lived life of a government. And the tendency always to leave things until after the next election. And in that we all have a common view. And yet we have a battle which we have to fight on a much longer term basis than that short term. So how do you balance the demands of democracy and the essential nature of defending the planet? And I think we've got as close to that as one can do. There are things which one knows are weaknesses. We have of course to get our pay and rations from someone and that's the department of climate change. And I can imagine circumstances which they would be able to screw down very tight. They're not, they've been very good on these things but that is always a possibility. So you have to recognise that the more you can make that independent better. But of course one's public position is such that it's quite difficult for people to behave badly because it will be all in the public domain. But it's still true that that is perhaps a weakness. It is a cumbersome system that in the end if a government isn't able to meet the budget by the means we recommend. They're perfectly able of course to make policies of a different kind as long as they meet the budget. It's the budget that's the important thing. If they didn't meet the budget and their policies didn't work then they would be open to action in the courts. Not action I think of the climate change committee itself would take but action which somebody else outside would take which would say you are statutorily required to meet this budget because you've passed it in parliament and that is true of all four budgets that we've got so far. And you haven't done it and you put forward alternatives to what was being presented by the climate change committee and you, those alternatives haven't worked. So if it's true that all of us have got to play this game because it's the only game in town if it's true that all of us are being affected by what is happening and if it's true that the way you have to do it is to find a mechanism whereby you don't keep on having a start-stop policy because that way we won't achieve it so that balance has got to be achieved. I do think that what we've done in the United Kingdom for all sorts of accidental reasons has seemed to be one of the best ways forward and we're very keen to co-operate in every way that we can within the European Union and bilaterally as well. Of course the European Union is crucial to all this. I am an unashamed Eurofan. It's crucial because we wouldn't have had the Kyoto protocol if it hadn't been the European Union. The European Union has been in the lead in all these things and we have to do our best to make sure that it doesn't slip back. It is crucial that the European Union fixes a really ambitious target for 2030 if it's going to be able to make the Paris decisions at the end of next year's successful. Of course it's true that the Climate Change Act is dependent on working within the European Union and being part of the totality of that and therefore we have a real role to play both in the United Kingdom and in Ireland to make those targets sufficiently strong to enable us to lead in the world because again if the largest trading unity in the world doesn't lead then you can't expect anybody else to follow and we are in a much better position today than we were a relatively short time ago. We now have China clearly taking really serious steps to decarbonise its energy production. Now partly of course it is because you can't walk down the streets in Beijing. I mean it's partly to do with the awful low level air pollution but it's also because they believe in climate change and they know in their own country that it's increasingly difficult to have water for many of their major centres. They know that they are getting both droughts and floods in the same year. They've now got a minister for floods because that's what happens all the time and they see it round the world and so they are genuinely now taking steps which you could compute as being the most far-sighted in the world and the underlying argument at the moment is that having shown that they are going to reduce the carbon intensity of their industry in a very sharp manner they are also now discussing not whether but when they will put a cap on their emissions. Now nobody could have thought of that even two years ago but the new administration is clearly determined to make a huge difference and then you look across the sea and see what's happening with President Obama when a country which has been so disappointing is now taking the best measures that it can and they are very significant measures and it's always been true that there's been an increasing effort by major parts of the United States states like California but the whole of the western states right up into Canada because even with the dreadful Canadian government also a conservative government but a really dreadful government but at least as far as British Columbia is concerned you have a carbon tax which works brilliant idea by the way oh we should all copy it if we could because what they've done is to set an independent committee again independence is very important in this because people don't trust governments because they think they are going to use green excuses to do other things and in that they are pretty likely to be true so that's not a bad thing to remember but this has an independent committee so that when they raise the carbon tax the independent committee ensures that every penny raised goes into reducing the income tax so of course people then are all keen on this because you can avoid the carbon tax if you don't drive as much, if you use less fuel you can find ways of reducing your tax bill but you can't avoid easily your income tax and your income tax is going down so it's had been a great success it was a party political proposal by the Conservatives but both parties, indeed all three parties in British Columbia now accept it and it's ceased to be a part of a legal argument so we ought to remember what's going on there going on around the world and so the European Union is not out there in front in the same way as it was it's still a pretty solid leader but only in the sense of being in the leading pack I believe that we were right in the United Kingdom to press for a more tougher target for 2030 although I do believe that we are better off to have targets which are overall and which are non prescriptive I've never been happy myself about the argument that you have to prescribe how much of your decarbonisation comes for example from renewables and then define the renewables and it seems to me that's not what we should do I'm a huge favour of renewables but it does seem to me that really you ought to be saying we want to decarbonise our electricity system and we do that in a whole range of different ways and some countries nuclear power will be part of that in other countries it won't be, in some countries it will be very considerably affected by reducing actual demand it may well be that smart metering and smart generation will contribute considerably I don't think you should be talking about I know this is contrary to Greenpeace I'm a heretic as far as I'm concerned because I don't think there's anything particularly moral about renewables the point about renewables is that they are renewable and that they don't have a carbon footprint in the same way as other things do but that's not the important thing the important thing is that they reduce your emissions they make it possible to fight the battle and again we must stop means being getting into the way of the end I do not find it really infuriating you spend time with people and you discover that they're not really interested even in renewables they're interested in solar and of course it's not as good or wind because everything else or wave or tidal or whatever it is we ought to be in that area we ought to be in the area of having a portfolio and the portfolio should be added to by the very important issue of energy efficiency and also I believe of interconnection because there's no doubt that we really ought to find a way in which we aren't constantly pushed off course by the difficulty of meeting our peak demand which is why I've always been very much in favour of more and more connection with France because their peak is different from ours there are three other big connections which we need to have I'm very keen on the connection with Ireland seems to me that that's a very sensible thing with Irish wind I want to see the connection with Iceland because again that provides you with a very important thing because it comes from heat and therefore you do have a base load advantage there and I want to see the connection with Norway because again you're getting water largely water generation which is a base load generator so I don't want to be in a situation in which we are prescriptive I want us to be in a situation in which we're setting budgets and setting targets budgets are better than targets because again they are less prescriptive you still have to deliver but your range of opportunities and attitudes can change and that's very important and I want to end on two points of this so the first important thing is that this is a tremendously exciting experiment because we've never before tried to do today something which will lead to a solution right the way forward in 2050 and I think those of us who are enthusiastic for it have to recognise what an enormous innovation this is and you have to structure things in a way which you can change as you get more knowledge I don't know, you don't know how soon if ever we will find a cheap way of storing electricity if you were to find that it would change entirely the way in which you would proceed because you then have to get out of the base load problem in a way which is really staggering much more important than carbon capture and storage but carbon capture and storage would make a huge difference to the way in which we were able to use gas for example as long as you don't get a hang up about renewables and recognise that you could perfectly well use gas if it didn't have the emissions that we have today so I do hope that people will recognise that although it's difficult it is crucial to have this long term plan and it's also very exciting to do it but to do it effectively you do have to have that mixture of certainty which budgets and targets set but a willingness to be very flexible and that means you have to have a portfolio of answers so that you can in fact move as science moves and as technology improves and the second thing which I think is very important behind all this is we must stop being miserable about it I really do believe that we are our own worst enemies because we constantly talk about the difficulties constantly talk about how hard it is and constantly talk about how dreadful other people are I want to say something quite different we are immensely fortunate to be living at the most exciting moment for 500 years not since the Renaissance have human beings had to look at the world in such a different way because we now live in a world which has to face a global problem and therefore it has to solve it on a global basis and that means our relationships with other countries totally change I was one of the 16 Conservatives who voted against the Iraq War and I voted against it primarily because I thought it was silly and immoral and illegal which was quite a big argument but also because I didn't think we'd worked out something which was very important which is that you can't win an imperialist war any longer even if you're on the right side which we were but you can't win it it's the peace you can't get because in a totally transparent world as we now have and in a world which we have to have global solutions to global problems the only way you can achieve that is by having a different sort of relationship with other countries and it's the end of imperialism mankind has always been imperialist since the first village bashed up its neighbours to get the grazing rights and so don't let's kid ourselves this is a very very deep held human attitude but we can't be that any longer because you can't achieve what you have to achieve in order for us to exist at all and I think you can either look on that as the United Kingdom independence party the Tea Party and all other parties of that kind have which is that they look at it as a sort of terribly depressing thing or you can as I do look at it as a wonderfully releasing thing because suddenly for the very first time what philosophers and theologians have taught about the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God becomes the necessity of human society it isn't just I'm not using that in an offensive way but it isn't just a theological or philosophic abstraction it becomes a practical necessity and we are the first generation all of us to have to make that work so it isn't surprising that the institutions that we need to do that don't exist that we have to invent them that we have to find ways of doing things that human beings have never had to do before and climate change happens to be the way that that has first manifested itself although as we look at the shortage of resources the population increases the larger number of people able to make choices as we look at those things we're going to have to do it anyway I just want to us to accept that with electoratee and enthusiasm rather than what I'm afraid very often happens is a kind of miserable thought if only life were like it was when I was young well this is one area which I'm jolly pleased it isn't