 Thank you, Eibann, Philip, and Alice. It's a real honour to be here. This institute is a beacon of cosmopolitan discourse in Ireland and across Europe. A beacon it has to be said right now in a darkening sky. So it's wonderful to feel the warmth of your bonfire and to be invited to throw a few logs of my own onto the brazier, if I can put it like that. I've always thought of myself through my whole life as British. But the moment I first set foot in Ireland too late in my life, I knew that here I was not British. Here I can never be British. Here in Ireland I'm English. And I now come often to Ireland and I have many friends here, not least Eamonn and his wonderful family. And I look forward to each visit and every time I step off the plane I offer silent thanks for the gift that Ireland has given me. The gift of knowing myself better because of course I was English all along. English and British, English and European, British and European by virtue of being English. You can't know yourself until you have seen yourself through your neighbour's eyes. And here's something else I owe this country. One Saturday night, almost exactly two years ago, I found myself, thanks to Eamonn, but it's quite a long story, in the village of Bally Vaughn in County Clare at the edge of the barren, that haunting landscape of crevice limestone just across the bay from Galway. I remember the lights of Galway twinkling like jewels on the water. To be more precise, my exact location, also thanks to Eamonn, for much of that night, Eamonn, was the front parlor of Lachlund's whiskey bar in Bally Vaughn. The room was packed. Nobody could get to the bar. Tumblers of green spot were being ferried to and fro in hands raised above the sea of heads, like those precious fragments of leaf that had borne aloft by processions of ants in a documentary by David Attenborough. There were a few interlopers like me, but most of the patrons were local. And they weren't only there for the whiskey, they were there to sing. And my God, they sang. They never stopped singing for hour after hour. Boardy songs, songs of the seasons, songs of loss and disappointment, songs of prodigality and redemption, even a very moving ballad about a property speculator and his comeuppance. Everybody knew the words to that one. And then suddenly a hush descended. And from that Saturday night congregation there rose a reverential chorus. And it's three score and ten boys and men. And it's three score and ten boys and men were lost from Grimsby town, from Yamath down to Scarborough. Many hundreds more were drowned. It was a chorus to a song that I'd last heard 40 years before in a seamans pub, the Baltic Tavern, now long gone on the quayside in Newcastle upon Tyne. I used to go there every Friday evening to hear old timers singing anthems of the sea. And the song I heard again in Lachlands tells of a vicious storm that swept like a scythe down the North Sea one February night in 1889, up and down the coast as dawn broke, mothers, wives, sweethearts were staring down a dark corridor of grief and possibly destitution in those days the loss of a breadwinner could easily fling you into the workhouse, a prospect that was equally feared on either side of the Irish Sea. Centuries of shared history have alas divided the Irish and the English as often as they have brought us together. And you're perhaps more conscious of that than we are. We English would do well to reflect more than we have so far on the footprints that we have left on Irish soil and the Irish imagination. And yet that night on the western edge of Ireland, men and women of the barren reached across time and space in grief for the lost sons of England's eastern shores a century before. We are all peoples of the sea. What we have in common matters more in any reckoning than what divides us. And that's a very good place from which to look at the problem of climate change. Ten months from now in Paris representatives of all governments will gather at the invitation of President Hollande on behalf of the United Nations. They will try to agree on promises we should make to each other in order to avoid dangerous climate change. Try to redeem the failure of our last attempt to do that in Copenhagen five years ago. Whatever unfolds in Paris will be momentous. Whether the conference succeeds or fails, it will tell us something crucial about the modern human condition. But no project can succeed unless those who embark on it really know what they are attempting and why. My parents' generation built what became the European Union to banish war from our continent. They knew that they were embarking on an ascent. They were going to learn the lessons of the past to build a better future. They were building the foundation they hoped for a Europe of peace and justice, a Europe of ever better rewards for honest work, where a portion of those rewards would be reinvested in the continuing struggle against want, idleness, ignorance, squalor and disease. With our climate project, do we really know what we are embarking on and why? Well, this too is an ascent. So let's now climb the first stair. You look around. People stride purposefully in all directions, heads down, eyes locked onto featureless ground at their feet. You peer at their faces and get a shock. Each of these eccentric folk looks the same. Each looks exactly like you. Excuse me, about climate change, you inquire as one rushes by. With hardly a broken stride, the answer flies back. That's environment over there. You can't see what they're pointing at, but before you can ask, they're off. The environment as we conceive it is not about us. It is outside us. Thanks to agriculture, cities, various interpretations of Scripture, including in Rome, humanism and the Enlightenment, we see ourselves as separate from the environment. We assert dominion over the environment, which is there in that view to meet our needs and be moulded to our ends. A question about the environment can only be a question about what we should do. It cannot be a question about who we are. For 10,000 generations we have walked the earth, never have we faced a question that is more about who we are than climate change. Only if we treat it as a question about who we are can we summon the will to do what we have to do. Climate change asks, are we curious about the world and each other? Climate change asks, are we willing to accept, really willing to accept the consequences of our actions? Climate change asks, are we still serious about peace and justice? Fair reward for honest work, the struggle against poverty. Climate change asks, are we going to choose cooperation, not conflict? Because that really is the choice and we have to decide now. So if anyone says to you, climate change is about the environment. However high and mighty they may be, they're being either ignorant or disingenuous. Box their ears, box their ears and climb higher, climb the second stair. You've entered a labyrinth of corridors and meeting rooms. People huddle in conspiratorial knots, clutching scraps of paper printed in a variety of languages to match the tongues in which they're arguing with each other. At the heart of the labyrinth is a cavernous chamber where people sit obediently in rows each behind a little flag and a microphone. You approach one of the huddled groups. This time you get a more friendly answer to your question. We're diplomats and climate change is about text they declare. You've come to the right place, negotiating text is our job. Climate change is not about negotiating text. National interests fixed in national politics set the instructions the negotiators carry into the chamber and therefore they limit the ambition any text can encompass. The level of ambition currently compatible with the way many parties to the negotiations see their national interests is too low, too low really to deal with this problem. And no text, no amount of text can make up for that. But climate change is about diplomacy. Only through diplomacy engaging with the political forces that shape other nations and our own can we realign perceptions of core interests and raise the limit of attainable ambition. Yes diplomats can negotiate text but so can other kinds of officials and lots of kinds of people. Those diplomats who think that text is the heart of this matter should refocus. But at least the diplomats have good intentions, they're making an effort, they do not deserve to have their ears boxed so thank them and climb higher, climb the third stair. Here are some eager looking people, they catch your eyes if waiting for a challenge. We're engineers, technologists, innovators they announce. Climate change is about energy and we're the people to sort it out. What you need is an energy system free of carbon emissions within a generation. We can build that, you can afford it, it will improve your health, lower your bills, free you from exploitative suppliers, protect you from price shocks. Nothing these people tell you is wrong. They too have good intentions and are making an effort. So thank them for their counsel and don't box their ears either. But just because we know how to do something does not mean we do it. Otherwise there would be no more hunger because we certainly know how to grow enough to feed everybody. You have not yet heard what you really need to know so climb higher, climb the fourth stair. The air now is getting rarefied. Around you are mountains, snowflakes tickle your cheek. You stand by a restaurant, its name reveals you're in a town called Davos. Diners emerge, radiating Bonomi, you put your question. Climate change, they explain why that's a matter for business. We're captains of finance and industry. You should have come to us in the first place. Those people bending your ear on the stair below, they work for us. Climate change, they say, is about the allocation of capital. We decide that. The post-carbon economy will be built if it is built at all through our choices about capital. There couldn't be a better time with interest rates low and lots of capital chasing reliable returns. Some of these jovial fellows, and they are mostly men, seem oddly hunched up. That's just the shareholders on our backs, they explain, not quite meeting your eye. But don't worry, we'll do our best to get you where we need to go. Business, until recently, seriously underestimated climate risk. Without climate security, there cannot be food, water or energy security. Without food, water and energy security, there cannot be stability. Without stability, business cannot invest. Whether it hits your infrastructure, your workforce, your supply chains, your cost of capital or your customers' purchasing power, or simply unleashes macroeconomic shocks, climate risk is bad news. If you thought systemic risk in the financial system was bad news, you haven't really thought about climate risk. Business is realising that, and that will be part, I imagine, of the discussion at the real Davos shortly. But business still seriously underestimates climate policy risk. Policy shapes the markets that business invests into. Policy has killed the old utility business model by driving down the cost of renewables. Look at today's financial targets. Some of you may have seen them, I brought it with me, so I'm going to bloody well use it as a crop here. Try and find it. U.S. utilities fear death spiral as more businesses and homeowners produce their own electricity. This is big news in the power sector. Policy will tilt the balance of risk and reward increasingly away from carbon-based energy as governments try harder to keep their climate promises and make new ones. Businesses exposed to climate risk will demand stronger policy. Businesses built around carbon-free energy will increasingly demand stronger policy. Businesses not locked into fossil energy through their business models will want to pick the winning side and will demand stronger policy. Policy may or may not eventually do enough, quickly enough, and will come back to that. But believe me, the pressure of policy will intensify, it won't ease. And businesses that bet against policy doing enough to drive out carbon in a generation from our energy system, those businesses are making a reckless gamble. Oil and gas companies whistling to keep up their own spirits and those of their shareholders about unburnable carbon, they're making a reckless gamble. The old safest houses link between energy guilt and pension fund returns is cracking. Oil and gas companies are squeezed in a three-way vice. Investors and regulators will want to de-risk unburnable carbon, low oil prices hit revenue, new resources cost more to prove and bring into the market. In oil and gas, here come the bears. To chase the bulls away says Eddie O'Connor, a wise entrepreneur from these parts. Outside the US, incidentally, there won't be much fracking for oil or gas. Even in the US, the fracking boom could yet end in tears. So making this transition won't be easy for business, but it will be an awful lot easier than not making it. So leave those diners in Davos to reflect on that in the Alpine air and climb higher, climb the fifth step. The light is now white and dazzling. You're greeted by soberly dressed technocrats. I tried to think of a sort of collective noun for soberly dressed technocrats, but I couldn't. So you're just greeted by any number you like of soberly dressed technocrats. You may think this place looks unreal, they say. That's because you've left reality behind. You are now in the economy, and you're in good hands because we're economists and we're the only people who know our way around here. The energy system is the foundation of the economy, they point out. That's what the Industrial Revolution was about. We harnessed the potential of fossil energy, which became embedded in the way the entire economy works, the whole pattern of production and consumption. What we have at the moment is a high carbon growth model. If we want to fix the climate, we need to replace it with a completely new growth model, a zero carbon one. That's a tough job. You're going to need to put us in charge. Well, economists have been in charge for a long time, not wanting to look economically illiterate the politicians whom we'll meet in a moment long ago surrendered to them. Economists, it turns out, know rather less than we thought they did about how the real economy works. The British economy is one sixth smaller today than they were telling us until 2008 it would be by now. They don't understand shocks, they don't understand climate and resource stress, and they don't really understand growth. The Office of Budgetary Responsibility in Britain, every six months I think it is, has to get up and make a prediction, tell you what its prediction is going to be for how much growth we're going to get over the next cycle. It makes its prediction, and what it then does is explain why its last prediction turned out to be so wide of the mark. The theory actually doesn't understand, certainly where the economy is under current conditions, what the deep springs of growth are. Economists told us to put a price on carbon, and that helps drive change at the margin in a model. In real life, we need structural change, not marginal change. Politics, not the market, sets the limit of ambition inherent in the carbon price, and even if the price were optimal, it would be drowned out in the real life boardroom by other conflicting signals. By the way, against the carbon price, I'm hugely in favour of resuscitating the European emissions trading scheme, but it's a secondary instrument, not a primary instrument to drive this transformation. We know enough about economics to know that we can make this transition in a way that makes us better not worse off overall, even in the short term. But we do not and will never have a precise economic map of the path we must take. Building that path will be a matter of praxis. Now the economists have started to argue among themselves, so you'd better leave them to it and climb higher. Climb the sixth stair. A friendly hand reaches down and pulls you up. Its owner wears a rosette like everybody else up here. We're politicians, they announce. Climate change is not about diplomacy or energy or capital or economics. Like everything else, climate change is about power. Yes, energy is the foundation of the economy, that's where power has its roots, where the relations of power in society are fixed. There was once a great storyteller called Marx who understood that. So if you want to fix the climate, you will need new power relations. Yes, we can afford the transition overall and there will be many winners, but they will never thank us and as you know, Ayman, from your experience, they will never say thank you and there will be losers too, some of whom have a lot of power. We're not quite sure this can be done and actually at the moment, we politicians are not exactly flavour of the month in many places, but if you want the climate fixed, you're going to need us. Politics is how we make choices together. It's the only way we have of doing that. In my lifetime, we've never been more divided than we are now. Only politics can bring us back together. In my lifetime, we've never been more lost than we are now. Globalisation has left us disoriented and fearful, easy prey for populists, demagogues, false prophets and pied pipers, all offering illusions of simplicity in a complex world. We need politics to remind us of where we really came from and to sing to us, to sing to us of where we must now go. But politics has forgotten how to sing. It has sold its harp for a pittance in the market. How can we make choices if the only available choice is what we are told the market demands? Politicians have stopped doing politics. Those who are still trying, nobody is trying harder than you and your counterparts across the green movement in Europe. But those who are still trying have alas not yet found a voice that can stir the hearts of the people. Meanwhile, those who have grown used to power just feel entitled to it and they've stopped trying. Those who have grown used to power now do policy, not politics. They confuse headlines with the countries they aspire to run because the headlines are easier to understand and manipulate. When reality and orthodoxy conflict, it is reality that must be mistaken. In Ireland and in Britain, we're being told the same story. Let's make our country the best place in Europe to do business. It's yesterday's story. There's no story about how we will reconnect the economy to the crumbling ecological base, how we will fix the climate, how we will protect ourselves against systemic risk, how we will contain the speculative economy and rebuild the real economy, how we will repair the broken social contract and the contract between generations, how we will breathe new life and purpose into a Europe that we now need more than ever but that has run out of political steam. Yes, we've come to the heart of the matter. Climate change is about politics before it's about anything else. But politics is broken. It's going to take a lot of politics to fix the climate. We're going to have to fix politics first. We're really now. You come to the seventh stair. You take a deep breath and you climb higher for the last time. The end of all our exploring is to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time, wrote T.S. Eliot. Around you, on all sides, are the same people you met when you started out. They have stopped striding. They stand like statues expectantly. They have stopped staring fixedly at the featureless ground. They stare at you. You stare back, and at last you can see into your own soul. Your soul says to you, the night is dark, but only by knowing darkness can you know the light. Your soul says to you, our future is not what happens to us, it is what we build together. Your soul says to you, to build the future you must first remember the past. Your soul says to you, full of treasure because it is full of songs. Nowhere, nowhere in the whole wide world are there more songs than there are here in Ireland. We English, having lost our songs, tried to take away yours. Songs are subversive. Queen Elizabeth rounded up the Irish bards and it is written burned their harps. She put their harps on a bonfire. She persecuted you for singing of Ireland itself. You turned away quietly and sang the secret song of Roshin Dove. Only when the oppressor forbids you to utter your own name can you know your own true strength and beauty. Your songs buried themselves under the ground. New struggles superseded old ones and new songs were written for them. Much of your politics today is locked into itself as once new songs now themselves from another time. But the old songs just buried themselves deeper. If we dig, we can still find them. The old songs tell us we live not by our individualistic choices in some imagined market. We live only through each other. The old songs tell us that what we call the environment never was separate from us and we never had dominion over it. We're part of it and it is inherent in us. Only through all that surrounds us can we also know ourselves. This ancient wisdom is Ireland's greatest asset. With this ancient wisdom Ireland can be a leader not a follower in fixing the climate. With this ancient wisdom Ireland can be a leader not a follower in renewing politics not just here in Ireland but across Europe we really need that. With this ancient wisdom there is no limit to what the people of Ireland can do together. The late Seamus Heaney I think understood this and he dug deep down into Irish soil when he wrote. And then there was St Kevin and the Blackbird. The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out inside his cell but the cell is narrow. So one turned up palm is out the window stiff as a cross beam when a Blackbird lands and lays in it and settles down to nest. Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked neat head and claws and finding himself linked into the network of eternal life is moved to pity. Now he must hold his hand like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks until the young are hatched and fledged and flown. And since the whole things imagined anyhow imagined being Kevin, which is he? Self-forgetful or in agony all the time from the neck on out down through his hurting forearms are his fingers sleeping? Does he feel his, still feel his knees or has the shut-eyed blank of under-ear crept up through him? Is there distance in his head alone and mirrored clear in love's deep river? Alone and mirrored clear in love's deep river to labour and not to seek reward, he prays. A prayer his body makes entirely for he has forgotten self, forgotten bird and on the riverbank forgotten the river's name.