 I was going to go back a little bit just before the formation of the Climate Change Committee and the setting up of the Climate Change Act in the UK, just to sort of think about some of the things that I'm sure you'll be thinking about here as you start to look forward to potentially bringing forward an act of your own. I think it's probably worth pointing out that the reason we had a climate change act in the UK was very much the result of public pressure. It was a reaction really to a series of government announcements by both parties, this is not a party political point, where both parties would set ambitious targets for cutting carbon emissions, would make all these promises about what they were going to do, would bring forward policy documents in order to make the cuts to improve housing to get people to drive greener cars, all the rest of it, which in many ways very few people had confidence would meet the targets but it was one of those impossible things to prove in advance. So you would go through this sort of slight charade of the new policies coming in, they'd do some good, they weren't bad policies, they didn't do any harm, but they would not meet the overall trends that were in carbon dioxide emissions. So your climate change policy would be a whole list of things about insulating homes, trying to encourage people to drive greener cars, which ignored the fact that as your economic policies were leading people to be more wealthy, they were consuming more, more people were driving even though perhaps cars were getting slightly better and so on. And we ended up basically with, I mean even things like our digital TV switch over led to quite a sizable increase in the use of electricity in the home because digital TVs used more power than the old analog TVs because many people had digital TV boxes which were left on permanently as opposed to analog TVs which you used to turn off and the whole way in which TVs were developing anyway was the whole idea that you just pressed a button instead of walking over to them and switching them off and that never featured in the climate change policy, it may be a small thing but that wasn't in the climate change policy, just the cuts. So what we saw over a period of time was a series of targets and a series of policies aimed at achieving something which was simply never achieved. And then eventually after sort of seven years of the government's latest 10-year programme to cut emissions, the minister would come forward and say, usually blame the previous government as well obviously, but say it no longer looks like these targets are manageable, we're going to have to have a review of targets, we're going to have to think again about where we go and start the entire process from scratch with a new set of unobtainable targets and with a new set of policies that we're going to meet them and the same thing would roll over again. And really sort of the time that Al Gore was bringing out his film, at the time that David Cameron was starting to make a much bigger deal of climate change policy, Tony Blair was, he was making it very central to our chairmanship of both the G8 and the EU. The public got to the stage where they no longer thought that was acceptable. We at Friends of the Earth came forward with the idea of a climate change bill, a piece of legislation, which would much more set out the framework by which carbon was managed. I think we had two things in mind. One at a sort of government level, we felt the budget process, which through which the Chancellor managed the economy and managed government spending and so on, was something where it wasn't that he always got it exactly right. I'm a bit of hindsight now, it's obviously the case, but I'm thinking about to 2006, but it was perfectly accepted that a Chancellor would come forward, make some changes to VAT rules, changing income tax, decide how much to spend on hospitals, all the rest of it. And then a year later, you'd find Tony Blair had invaded somewhere, so the budget had had a huge extra spending there. The taxation system hadn't raised quite as much as expected, but we had a process where we simply rolled that forward into the next budget, rearranged taxes, rearranged spendings, cut back where necessary, brought in some more money where necessary to rebalance the budget for the next time. And we wanted to see the same sort of process taken with carbon. So it was a rolling process, it wasn't just announced something and 10 years later say you failed. The other way I think we used these as an example of looking at it was everybody agreed that we had to cut this carbon emissions. We didn't have some sort of party political split about climate change not existing on the right and existing on the left. And that is something that I think we should all value and really welcome. So we had something that everybody said was important to do and that everybody accepted. You had to do sort of piece by piece steadily cutting the emissions across a long period of time. And I don't know if it was just because I was buying a house at the time, but it reminded me very much of going to the bank to organise a mortgage. I had a huge loan bigger than anything I had ever had before and everybody knew I had to pay it back off. But there was no other bank manager would let me out of the bank without setting out a plan for how I would pay it back month by month over a period of time. And yet somehow on carbon dioxide terms it was perfectly acceptable to just make a promise for what you would achieve over a period of time. No plans, no checking, no checking back, none of that. So we really tried to get the whole idea of this being a management process to run through the bill and it got very enthusiastically taken up by a very large number of members of parliament who I think had seen the failure over too many years, seen the failure to deliver and picked it up. Including people who thought that we were being too ambitious about our carbon emission cuts, and including those who thought we weren't being ambitious enough, I think everybody recognised that we needed a basis on which we measured this and took it forward. We therefore drew up the first Climate Change Act in about 2005. It was introduced just before the 2005 election in the UK by three very senior backbench MPs who had long records on climate change. It was Michael Meatshire, John Gummer and Norman Baker from the Liberal Democrats. So we immediately brought it forward with cross-party support. Although we specified a particular structure, we suggested annual targets for a 3% cut each year and we actually, I'm ashamed to say, we didn't suggest there should be a committee on climate change. Instead we gave a lot of new powers to parliament to hold the government to account and we gave new powers and new duties to the site committees within parliament to hold ministers to account. But the principles rather than the actual details of the bill was what we were really interested in. The four principles that we set out, which in a sense were sort of non-negotiable however the bill turned out, was it had to be based on this principle of cumulative emissions. For too long we'd gone along with this idea that we would have a 2050 target which was so far off that no government minister was ever going to be able to account for it and actually was irrelevant anyway because if we'd met that target by continuing our emissions as we were and then inventing something magical in 2049 and cutting emissions down and meeting the 80% or the 60% as it then was target, it would have been too late. When we put a ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere it stays there for, it comes out very gradually, but most of it is still there in 2050. And therefore those cumulative emissions, the amount you just keep pumping into the emissions means that by the time we get to 2050 if you haven't done anything about it to be honest it's only made any difference what cuts you make. There is so much in the atmosphere we would be suffering extremely dangerous global warming. The second was that the rate of cuts that we needed needed to be based on science. We did not want a process that looked at all of the things government ministers might like to do because they'd be quite positive added up the contribution they would all make and set that as the target. We wanted to do it the other way around which was to say what needs to be done and therefore how are we going to achieve it. So the idea that this had a strong science base was absolutely essential. Our third principle was that every government had to be held to account. The idea of long-term targets had been shown to fail. It had also been shown to fail in other areas which I'd campaigned on. I've worked on fuel poverty at the turn of the century and we passed I suppose a similar act of parliament the warm homes and energy conservation act which set government a 15-year target to end fuel poverty in the UK. The honest truth was that six, seven years into it we could see quite clearly that governments had not been cutting fuel poverty and in exactly the way I described as used to happen with carbon targets just a few weeks back in parliament a minister said he didn't think fuel poverty targets could be met anymore. The reason was simply that early governments didn't do enough and I have some sympathy with the current minister saying it's going to be extremely hard to meet those because the previous government didn't do anything. That is absolutely true. It's not a particular political point. It happens across the board. So we wanted every government held to account. And the final thing was that we believed and we had a great deal of support that that would provide a certainty for industry and a certainty for investors to understand where the government was going to have that sort of long-term trajectory that knew that they could invest with confidence in the solutions that were necessary. We actually had the support of the CBI from a very early stage in the UK for this approach, not on every detail. We differed on targets. We differed on issues like aviation and shipping being included in them. But it was Digby Jones who when I first talked to him and in many ways Digby Jones wasn't the leader of the CBI who you would most expect to support this kind of approach who said immediately that is exactly what we need. What industry cannot stand is this chopping and changing and ministers saying one thing but now they'll get away with it and not doing anything on it and it gives no one any confidence to invest. So they were the four principles and in fact at one stage I think there were three different climate change bills doing the rounds. This is before the government announced theirs. There was the one that we had drafted. The Liberal Democrats had one and the Conservative Party had one as well. So they were all floating around. They all had different mixes of measures. They had rolling targets, carbon budgets, annual targets, committees, select committees, all sorts of things to try and hold these things to account. But they actually were all trying to do exactly the same thing that was to set up this management process. We went through quite a long process in the UK. First of all of having a draft piece of legislation which is a relatively new way for the UK government to work which was scrutinised by three committees within parliament, by select committees and by a special committee set up across the Lords and the Commons. We spent a whole year looking at that with three major reports going back to government to say what was right and what was wrong with it. We then had the actual process of passing the law itself and it was during that process that I absolutely paid tribute to the government. They did it in an extremely inclusive way, an extremely open way. It was an excellent debate and I firmly believe that the bill came out much the better for that. It didn't come out exactly as we set it up in the first place but I think of those four principles we very largely met them. We are science based. We do look at cumulative emissions as David has explained. We do hold governments to account through the mechanism of David's committee looking every year and reporting back where the government is on track and it has provided that much greater certainty for industry that was so much needed to help people to invest and as a result it has retained the support of industry and indeed the CBI were one of those calling for the very robust target that the committee went ahead and tried to set. I think its strengths over the years has been the fact that the independent committee has given this solid weighty respected advice to government and I think actually that has helped to release governments and ministers from the problems that they face as well. It always is difficult if you are in government without this kind of framework to trade off things like putting a levy on an energy bill to help people to insulate their home which is inevitably going to put up an energy bill and knowing that ten years down the line if you don't insulate homes people will face even higher energy bills. People aren't very good at looking forward to compare in ten years time. There probably energy bills will have gone up in ten years time, let's face it, but people will compare them to what their bills are now, not what they would have been if the government hadn't acted and many of these things have got quite long term benefits for people and often short term impacts and I think it has helped ministers enormously to be slightly freed from that absolute day to day politicking over what can be done and what can't be done and to rely on a more substantial body of evidence. I think the other thing which for my mind is the real strength of it is that in the debates that we had around climate change and around the policies that came forward prior to having a climate change act it was absolutely straightforward when one government said we'll put VAT on fuel because that will make it more expensive and people will use it more carefully. The other party would say no, don't do it. Now they still do that to some extent, there's no point pretending, but now because you have to meet a carbon budget if you're going to say no we're not going to take that policy or no we don't like wind turbines we're not going to build those or no we're anti nuclear we're not going to build nuclear power stations any of these positions you have to have the balancing position and you have to say if we built that nuclear power station it would have saved x million tonnes of carbon we're not going to do it because we are going to do something else instead and I think that has changed this whole debate from one where everybody can just knock the policies and not want to do them because they're a bit difficult to one where people have to try and find the best way through this and the best set of policies in order to get to the place that we need to be and that has transformed the debate in the UK and is really doing away with all of the details that's the thing that's made the difference. We've changed it from something where you can knock everything to something which is like taxation policy where if I want to employ nurses I have to tell somebody else who how much I'm going to put tax up or tell teachers they're going to get the sack in order to give me the money and as soon as you start doing those trade off you can arrive at a sensible policy.