 priorities. I commend the Institute for fostering this great interest it has in China. It's the world's oldest culture, new superpower, largest population and most dynamic economy. And I commend it also for stimulating interest in climate change, the greatest challenge confronting us as a species. These two issues, the rise of China and the growing threat of climate change, are joined together in my address today which we've called Saving the Planet, China and Climate Change. The address is motivated by the belief that it's essential for the good governance of the global community that we in Europe should develop a deep understanding of China's social and economic policies and their systems. It's imperative that our two civilizations cooperate rather than compete to deal with this menace that confronts both of us equally and that is of catastrophic climate change. This is essential because the global community is scheduled to meet in two years' time at the conference of parties to try and agree to the successor to Kyoto and deal with climate change in the post-2020 era. It will do so at the conference of parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Paris. This will happen in December 2015 and will be known as COP 21. The general expectation is that binding emission targets will be set for high-emitting countries. Bargains struck between developing and developed states and decisions made about equitable division of the remaining carbon budget that we can afford to release into the atmosphere. There were similarly high expectations, of course, from COP 19 or COP 15, which is held only four years ago in Copenhagen and it failed completely. COP 21 has to succeed and here's why. The International Panel on Climate Change produced its fifth assessment report at the beginning of September, which said that there's now only a 50% chance of keeping global warming to less than two degrees by the end of the century. It went on to say that in order to stay within the two-degree threshold, total emissions can't exceed 1,000 gigatons of carbon. I mean, there are some 12,000 gigatons of carbon locked up in the Earth surface and our species only emerged when they got locked up. It went on to say that in order to stay within the, sorry, yet more than half this amount has already been put into the atmosphere. So we're dealing with a very low amount of carbon that we still can afford to shove up into the atmosphere, somewhere in the order of 230 gigatons and nothing at all, two or 3% actually of the carbon that's in the Earth's surface. And so we've had all kinds of commentary about this. We've had, you'll be familiar with Lord Stern in the UK and he tells us that we have to reach, in the next 15 to 20 years we have to actually have conquered this emissions of carbon and that we have to engage in sufficient international negotiations to limit that. And this should focus all the minds of all the governments of the world on what's going to happen at COP 22. We've been reminded last year of the threat we faced, reminded as we said by three international organizations which have no axe to grind except they want to preserve the future of our species. Perhaps the most ominous came from the World Bank, which published a report called Turn Down the Heat, prepared by a team from the Potsdam Institute in Berlin led by Professor Schellenhuber. They warned against a four degree rise in temperature by 2050 unless we accelerated plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It even suggested the rise in temperature could get as high as six degrees under certain circumstances, which is actually staggering when you think that the average temperature in the Earth at the moment is about six degrees in the atmosphere. These warnings were repeated when a delegation from this institute of which I had the great honor to be a member of visited Potsdam some months ago and met Professor Schellenhuber and his colleagues. The International Energy Agency consisting of all OECD countries had a similar message in its 2013 World Energy Outlook which was launched by its chief economist Fatih Biral here in this institute. The IEA was equally uncompromising in its forecast of rising temperatures and believes the increase will be in the order of 3.6 degrees by 2050 unless we cut back on the use of fossil fuels and achieve major savings in our use of energy. The report said there was little chance of keeping the rise in temperature to two degrees if we fail to act over the next five years. You know we're on a very very tight time scale here after that and be too late. At the same time the United Nations Environment Programme published its annual report of the gap between what emissions should be in 2020 and what they're likely to be and the conclusions were chilling Madam Chairperson. The report said that the gap is now bigger than it was in earlier assessments and that the situation is getting worse. Akim Steiner, the UN Undersecretary General who heads up the programme, said in his introduction that unless action is taken to close the gap urgently, the longer term challenge may be insurmountable. You'll all be very aware in any event that these and similar conclusions are reached by Lord Stern who I had the great pleasure of meeting recently in a report commissioned for the British Government. That's when the British Government was seriously interested in doing something about it. He described climate change as the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen and said that what we have to do over the next 10 or 20 years can have a profound effect on the whole future of our species and indeed the British Government went on to join with Europe at that time as a result of these thoughts from Lord Stern. But if the science of climate change is clear, the mathematics of the carbon budget simple, the politics of acting on the IPCC report are neither clear nor simple, but daunting. The task at COP 21 will be to strike a global deal that faces up to the urgency of the task as defined by the international agencies we've just talked about. There's no time left for provocation and no room for maneuvering compromises. We can't bargain with nature was a great quote from Professor Schellenhuber which he said here at the Institute last year. The laws of science are implacable and the clock is ticking. COP 21 is therefore one of those occasions when the countries of the world will have to act as a global community confronted by common if differentiated responsibilities. Or else if the countries elect to act individually, the fate of each will be sealed and the reports that I've just quoted I have no doubt will come to pass. No region, no country, no part of the globe, no land or sea would be immune from catastrophic climate change. Continued carbon emissions said one summary in the assessment review five, which we talked about earlier on, will drive further heat waves, rise in sea levels, melting ice and extreme weather. Just to say, you know, a few years ago you saw simultaneously with floods which displaced 20 million people in Pakistan, you saw 10% of the Russian forest getting burned down. And the scientists who can be a bit reticent about attributing blame said this is almost certainly like 95% certain to have been due to anthropogenic global warming. So we have to change human behavior. That's the task that faces us all and particularly our politicians. And this conclusion, Madam Chairperson, is the context of evaluating China's response to the threat of climate change. The background is that China produces about a quarter of the world's carbon emissions. It is already the world's second largest economy, and it generates about 70% of its electricity from coal. It's obvious if its present rate of economic growth is sustained, and if the heavy reliance on coal is maintained at current levels, that China will imperil itself and endanger the world. It requires little analysis to conclude that in broad terms, China needs to put a cap on its carbon emissions and a physical limitation on the use of coal. But it also needs to green its transportation system, retrofit the existing building stock, reengineering its manufacturing processes, build new sustainable eco cities and towns, base power generation on renewables, and reforest vast tracks of grassland to name only a few of the tasks that face China and the world. The question is whether China has the political will, the administrative structures, the technological capacity to live on this agenda. Now, I'm convinced that the answer is yes. And this debate is really about the future of civilization. My belief is that the oldest and, in my opinion, the most perfect civilization will lead in the global struggle to save all our civilizations. In terms of scale and urgency, I believe China has the ability to deliver on goals that measure up to this climate change challenge. And the main reason I say this is because of its planning system. In China, economic development has been consciously planned on the basis of long-term coherent, mutually reinforcing policies in which progress is iterative, cumulative, and sequenced in the right order, and that's something to accomplish in any planning system. The plan has been put together in a society based on meritocracy. The civil service examinations in China go back, I believe, 2,000 years, and always the brightest selected to run the country. And it's a deeply historically rooted affair in China, this meritocracy. China's planning today represents the greatest ever exercise in organizing the collective intelligence of the people. And there's nothing to compare with the way China mobilizes and uses its combined intellectual power for planning its future. The system is open, it's properly resourced, it's based on learning experimentation, and is highly organized with an established methodology for dividing up the process into a series of 10 different phases, which drive the process forward on an iterative basis. Outlined by one of China's leading thinkers, Professor Hu An Gang, he calls it the most democratic and participatory planning system in the world, a process which I explored in depth in the last lecture that I gave. And it was amazing to study. In many respects, the planning process itself is the secret of the so-called Chinese miracle. Essentially, it's a process that enables the country to think about itself continuously, as it has done for 60 years now. And to engage in what Michael Spence, the Nobel Laureate for economics called continuous policy navigation during his lecture here two weeks ago. Now, the value of planning, as we know from business, is that it can accomplish that most difficult of tasks, of marrying continuity and change. Because it is iterative, planning can help the country to maintain political stability, while simultaneously undergoing profound shifts in the way its economy and society are organized and managed. The Chinese five-year plan not only achieved this objective, but also have the enormous benefit of detecting emerging problems in advance so that they can be tackled before they become insuperable. One such problem, of course, is climate change, and the good news is that the Chinese are tackling this problem, and in doing so may well save the planet, especially if we Europeans choose to work along with China. In the new study on China, Orville Schell and John DeLaurie analyzed the perennial preoccupation of Chinese leaders with the concepts of wealth and power, the title of their book. The logic is simple. To be wealthy is to be powerful. To be poor is to be weak. To be weak is to be exploited, and to be exploited is to be humiliated. This is what happened to China during the century of humiliation, imposed on her by the imperialist powers, which ended only in 1949 with the establishment of the People's Republic of China. The mindset of wealth and power explains Ding Xiaoping's statement that to get rich is glorious, and President Xi's recent launch of his China dream. In short, to be rich means to be free, and to be powerful as well. Hence the relentless focus on economic growth, which has produced the biggest economic success in history. Since Ding Xiaoping first set China on this new path in 1978, the Chinese economy has grown more than 15 times in volume, and is set to become the biggest economy of the world within the next decade, possibly surpassing America by 2017. The most recent growth figure is 7.8% for the last quarter, belying some Western attempts to say that the economy there was slowing down. But economic growth brings its own problems, and the depletion of natural resources and the pollution of air, water, and the earth. The Chinese experience has been no different, and the authorities had to start responding to environmental degradation. But the rate of response couldn't keep pace with the rate of economic development, so that the quality of air and water rapidly became major public issues, and anybody who visits China would be well aware of them. This became particularly evident in respect of the smog affecting Beijing and other cities, especially in the northeast, and the flooding of cities, which is now a major concern. This became particularly evident in, or sorry, but within the minds of the Chinese planners, environmental problems began to take on a broader dimension, with the realization that man-made activities had even wider implications. Consequently, the negative effects of climate change began to get factored into the planning philosophy. This became particularly evident in 2007, when the National Development and Reform Commission, the NDRC, which is at the apex of the Chinese planning system, published a national scheme for tackling climate change. Design for the period up to 2020, the scheme included five major objectives, which have been incorporated into the five-year plan, and they are, you know, quite logically really. Energy conservation at a rate of 20% reduction every five years, very ambitious target, and the aim to achieve a cumulative reduction of 50 to 80% by 2020. Emission reduction at a rate of 10% every five years. Here the aim is to have a cumulative reduction of 50% by 2020. China is to become a green technology's innovator and leader. China is to become the world's largest wind power and solar power market and increase the use of clean energy to 20% of all energy consumed, and China is to build the world's biggest artificial forest, carbon sink, and the world's largest green screens. Now, I believe there are 48 million people working planting trees in China. I haven't been able to verify that, but I've read it, and I believe it, like it's staggering. As can be seen, climate change policy itself itself has progressively moved from energy conservation to a combination of energy efficiency and emissions reductions. The reduction targets are, you know, seriously ambitious and highly challenging. For example, the 20% reduction in unit GDP emissions means that the annual growth in total energy consumption has to be kept to 5.2%, so in simple terms, if they were growing at 10%, they wanted to keep the the energy growth to 5.2%. Now that's quite a challenge to do, and it's actually it's actually been accomplished, and that target was reached on time, and this is what amazes everybody who who studies China is to see how they set themselves what we in business called B-haggs, big, hairy, aggressive goals, and then they exceed or equal or exceed those. The scale of the achievement can be gauged from the comparable EU targets where we set ourselves a 20% target, the 2020 vision, and is now enshrined in our law. They're going to get, Europe is going to get there nine years after China. The Chinese reduction targets are obligatory and are legally binding binding for reasons that are instructive as the insight into their way of working. Originally the targets had been obligatory, and then in one five-year plan they went to a voluntary set of targets, and then they suddenly found of course that in the 10th five-year plan the emissions actually went up, and the energy usage went up, and so they went back to what is the real logical way to do things, and the way we've chosen in Europe is to give ourselves binding, statutory targets, and measure, and manage according to those targets. And there have been reapplied in China now and everything is working according to them. But the significance of the 20% reduction target went beyond the economic. More importantly, it was the political commitment by the Chinese government to both its own citizens and to the people of the world. And I believe that the political commitment and its successes implementation is grounded in such deep cultural constructs as Mi'anxi, Guangxi, and respect for due authority, which seems almost to be, well they are, unique attributes of the of the Chinese culture. The political will and determination of the Chinese government to promote energy conservation and emissions reduction, cope with climate change and develop a low-carbon economy. The target is the first bold attempt to create a low-carbon economy, its political significance overshadows its economic significance, particularly in a world where leadership is called for. The political significance of creating a low-carbon economy is clear. Of equal interest is the fact that has never been tried before, not even in the developed world. For a country in the course of development like China, the challenge is more complex than for the developed world since the task is not only to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but simultaneously to increase economic growth, a really difficult target. Experience tells us however that emissions increase with growth, hence reducing emissions while growing the economy would appear to be a contradiction in terms. But the task of reconciling these policy goals is complicated further by the broader process of economic transformation underway for the past 30 years in which the Chinese economy has been moving from a centrally planned one, the classic communist-type economy, to a combination of planning and market forces. The process is now well advanced and irreversible, giving rise to the coexistence of two parallel economies and to what Deng Xiaoping described as socialism with Chinese characteristics. In these circumstances, it is no surprise that administrative controls over greenhouse gas emissions are now to be replaced by a market cap and trade scheme. Nor should it be a surprise that the scheme will be introduced on an experimental basis, this time in keeping with Deng Xiaoping's advice to cross the river by feeling the stones. Tricky process, by the way, but it's done in China with great success. And while the process of getting to this point has been enormously complex, it can be summarized as follows. First of all, the National Development and Reform Commission issued the low-carbon provinces and low-carbon city pilot notices to determine how the pilot scheme would work. The Commission next issues a market readiness proposal setting out a three-year work plan for its core competence of a national emission trading scheme. Then in a move that was foreshadowed in the 12th five-year plan and which has attracted much international attention, a pilot program was approved for seven regions, consisting of five cities, Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Chongqing, and the two provinces of Guangdong and Hubei. Now, despite the fact that in the first 100 days in Shenzhen, there were only 185 carbon trades, and despite the fact that events with the imprisonment of Boljulai in Chongqing has meant that it hasn't participated in the scheme, we see this as, you know, the very traditional way that China, particularly since then has learned by doing. So you try it in the provinces, you try it in the cities, you see what works and what doesn't work, you import what works there into the capital, and then you're ready to export that to the world. These regions together amount to 7% of China's carbon emissions and in aggregate terms will cover between 800 million to 1,000 million tons of carbon by 2015, which to give you a sense of scale is more than Germany's annual emissions and about half that of the EU. The scheme began in Shenzhen on the 17th of June, gone by the choice of location being significant as Shenzhen was originally picked by Deng Xiaoping as one of the country's proving grounds for market capitalism, an experiment which was reputedly based on Jiang Zemin's visit to Shenzhen here in Ireland where he will be going to that some other time, but I believe that was based and Liming will explain that to us later on. At that time, Shenzhen had a population of 30,000 people fishing town and now it's one of China's largest city with 11 million people. And when they're, you know, you hear about restrictions in China, I walked down through the university and I found the least addition of the economists in English, uncensored, no red marks through nothing. So I'm very delighted I must say see that. In view of its symbolic role in the modernization of China and the scale of its economic success, it can be taken for granted that whatever works in Shenzhen will be extended to the rest of China in a while. For its part, Beijing recently launched its own pilot scheme, having circulated trading rules last year regarding the allocation of allowances and the use of offsets and price control mechanisms. According to its draft implementation plan, more than 600 companies in Beijing will be required to cap their carbon emissions. It is expected that free permits will be allocated on the 31st of May each year and that participants will have to surrender their permits annually to the municipal government. Allowances are to be determined by emission intensity rather than absolute terms. This is quite a sophisticated process, as you'll understand, different from very different from what we did in Europe. There will be an annual review of each company's industrial value added, which will lead to an increase or decrease in the absolute emissions allowance so as to maintain a fixed ratio of emissions to GDP. Intensity-driven allowances are a novel concept and if it succeeds could be set as an example for other countries to follow. If all goes well, China aims for a nationwide scheme to be in place by 2016. That's really, really ambitious, even for China. Surveys in China, by the way, are the key question of price where we've gone so wrong in Europe. Surveys of businessmen in China suggest that if they could get a price or if a price was to be dictated of 23 euros per tonne per tonne of CO2 that that would begin to impact on human behavior and businesses would actually spend money and diversify their technology base and change their behaviors in order to accomplish reduction in carbon emissions. And that's not enough, a lot different from what we in Europe thought as the base price when we introduced the ETS which was about 20 euros per tonne. So let me sum up this development by quoting our report published last September on new markets, new mechanisms, new opportunities by the London-based financial advisors carbon trading capital. It said that China had proven itself a worthy advocate of climate change policy with the launching of its ETS pilot scheme and with the great potential for the development of a national market. It believed China are likely to provide a multitude of socioeconomic, financial and learning opportunities for other countries and most importantly could act as a model for the rest of the world to follow. There's no doubt whatever that the prospect of China introducing a national emissions scheme by 16 is the best possible news for those of us who want to see change in global warming. Going into COP 21 with the national scheme about to be launched within months, China will set the agenda for Paris for doing what we all know is essential and what most believe to be inevitable that is capping and progressively reducing the amount of carbon we've met to the atmosphere. With the European Union scheme broken and no possibility of a national scheme in the United States China is to be thanked for leading the world again. Many other measures almost too numerous to mention and I have to apologise for the sometimes the detail you have to talk about here but there's almost no way to think in terms of 1.3 billion people that's a ridiculous number that's 1,300 million people and to think that there's vast experimentation going on there and you know how much we could debate about things going on here in Ireland with four and a half million of us. We just have no real concept of how this government runs this country and does such a spectacular an amazing job at doing that. But as I say there are many other measures that are going to be adopted for example the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Housing and Urban Rural Development have launched a small green towns initiative under which financial support is being provided selective towns for a range of new activities including energy efficiency and renewable energy applications. Earlier this year the Minister for Transport took the initiative on greening the transport system which will cover railways, roads, waterways and airlines. And this is flanked by a major program on introducing electric vehicles which we know from separate knowledge that Warren Buffett has invested down in Shenzhen in the batteries that will power most electric cars of the future. Around the same time the NDRC issued a proposal on energy conservation plans for no less than 10,000 enterprises which may be later expanded to cover more than a million enterprises. Then as we said on the to coincide with the opening in Shenzhen of the carbon trading scheme they held a national low carbon day and that was launched to the theme of practicing low carbon energy building a beautiful homeland. The aim is to raise public awareness of energy saving low carbon development and it's clearly destined to be an annual reaffirmation of the national goal of creating low carbon society. As at the structural level investment in energy efficiency and renewable energy came to 50 billion last year an increase of 20% of the previous year making China the number one global player in this field. So mention of renewable energy brings us back to the use of coal and generating electricity the real elephant in the room. No serious progress can be made on reducing carbon emissions until Chinese coal usage is drastically reduced but until last month no attempt had been made to do so and it was possible to envisage that coal usage would have doubled or maybe even trebled by 2050. On the other hand the 12 five-year plan contained objectives on climate change that could only mean momentous change in generation and in the middle of August the State Council announced plans to make energy saving central to the economy of 2015. In an attempt to stimulate technological innovation environmental protection industries are to receive funding from the government not unexpectedly the plan will address air, water and soil pollution. It's intended that the sector will grow by 15% per annum so that it becomes a pillar sector of the economy with the projected annual turnover of 320 billion and the end of making China the biggest manufacturer of environmental protection technologies in the world. But welcome as it was the initiative could have been incomplete without and unconvincing without corresponding action on coal. The action came a month later on as recent as September the 11th. The State Council announced it was banning the construction of new coal fired plant power stations in industrial centres like Beijing and Tianjin in northern China and the Yangtze and Pearl River deltas in eastern and southern China covering both Shanghai and Guang Shan. The hope is that by 2017 Beijing residents will be breathing in 25% less particulate matter when compared to 2012. If achieved a reduction of 25% in five years will be truly impressive but actually needs to be. Anybody who's been there knows that they have to accomplish this. This is when you can see the end of the room and you know things are very bad. The State Council announced our announcement was met with shock on the part of the world media and most particularly by the global coal industry and Forbes has said well that's one way to do it. Indeed it was and it was a graphic example of how China uses the most appropriate tools to hand to achieve its objectives market mechanisms for carbon trading and an administrative fiat on coal. The State Council decision is intended to reduce the dependency on coal from 70% to 65% by 2017 and while the percentage may drop the absolute amount of coal used will not. But as many analysts have noted the decision is a significant step in the right direction. Again it's amazing China builds a new Greece economy every 10 weeks I think and a new Chinese electricity system every year or sorry a new English electricity system every year. So you know when you when you start moving percentages down from 70 to 65 that might not sound a lot but that is a lot. That takes a big commitment and endeavor to do that. This is just the beginning of what is going to be the biggest ever transformation of any energy system in the world. In my last lecture two years ago I said that plans for clean and efficient coal fire generation sets the use of shale gas and the development of nuclear power were incompatible with the ecological objectives as set out in the 12 year plan and I expected them to be heavily modified and eventually abandoned. And I think that's what's happening right now. The old system can't go on in China. The people won't have it and the government doesn't want it. The overall energy transformation remains to be unveiled but is clearly in the course of preparation as the planners tinker around with different technologies and I believe that transformation to be underway. The coal question had to be attacked and it has now been put on the national agenda. There's a great deal of damage to be undone like the smug that shut down the city of Harbin this week with a reading of 1000 on the PM 2.5 index compared with the world health organization safety level of 20. So you understand when I say it has to be done. Beijing itself regularly records levels of 150. Organization has penalties such as smug as well as the floods that afflicted 258 cities last year and cannot continue at its current pace without drastic remedial action. And that is why I expect even faster advances in reducing the use of fossil fuels and increasing the rate of renewables adaptation. And China will be is the largest investor in renewables in the world and that will be reinforced over the next few years and they'll also be moving into offshore wind as well an area close to my own heart. I hope this evidence I have assembled proves that China is seriously intent on combating climate change and that has already taken a global leadership position which can only grow stronger as it delivers on its targets and as other others falter in their obligations. The effects of these policies will be cumulative and increasingly persuasive. For example according to the International Energy Agency last year's emissions in China were the lowest for a decade due to the greater energy efficiency and increasing reduce of renewables so the policies are beginning to bite. The climate institute in Australia an independent think-tack reacted to the emissions scheme pilot schemes by saying that between 25 and 2020 China's policies may well lead to the largest single reduction of any country in the history of action on climate change by cutting emissions by 4.5 billion tons. Going into COP 21 China will be there on the basis of its achievements and of its ambitions and the record behind it and it'll be armed with a moral authority that almost no other country can match certainly none that we know of. In an otherwise gloomy world Europe is the other bright hope for success at the COP the Conference of Parties to be held in Paris in 2015. Europe led at Kyoto without it there wouldn't have been a Kyoto and later again Europe led at Copenhagen but as we said that was a real disaster. What the EU did in the past was actually very brave leadership in the world and it needs to get its act together now as with a functioning emissions trading system the so-called ETS. The European ETS system was defective at its outset we wrote the Commission telling them this that it couldn't work and this has been reinforced and has led to such disasters as we were importing American coal into Europe now because the price for carbon dioxide is three euros a ton and our emissions have started to go up in Europe as a result of our ETS our emission trading system which is an absolute dismal and complete failure and given the imminence of COP 21 Europe's strategy should be to design an emissions trading system which mirrors what's happening in China indeed the moment is right for the EU and China to cooperate together in working out a common or harmonized and compatible system which could then be progressively adopted as a template for the rest of the world and the price is huge a joint trading scheme would put a floor on the price of carbon put a cap on emissions and create the framework for a global carbon budget which we mentioned early on it would meet these three objectives all at once the problem with the proposal for coordinated action is the absence of a strategic relationship between Europe and China which exists on paper of course but whose main outcome seems to have been meetings about meetings the failure seems to be of greater concern to China than actually does to the member states of the European Union which are each busy trying to outdo one another in concluding bilateral deals with China instead of working together on European positions in fact I have to confess I'll be heading off I think in March with David Cameron on a bilateral visit to China and my excuse is that we're going to try and help them build off shorewind and we're going to get a couple of billion or trillion to invest in European offshore wind but it's a lame excuse we really should be doing this as a European society the Chinese Academy of Social Science in a recent paper on the strategic relationship between China and Europe asked how many Europe's are there and the answer is too many national interests are predominant again and this is the very antithesis of the European Union if I'm going to borrow a phrase from President Xi the euro crisis has fragmented the European Union and has led to a breakdown in the sort of solidarity that characterized its early days the economic depression drove countries back in on themselves and fractured the unity of purpose that had previously been the hallmark of the new Europe built by Jean Monnet and Jacques Delors such fragmentation is out of place with our past successes our present preoccupations and our future ambitions it is certainly at a step with the threat of climate change on the one hand and the challenges created by the rise of China and the other as Marshall McLuhan said in the early 60s we live in a global village and we can't compete and we can't work and we'll never succeed if we treat one another as just a whole bunch of separate nations trying to swim in a sea that's created by others we Europeans have an opportunity of responding by resuming our leadership role on climate change and developing a strategic relationship with China and global affairs if we were to do that I believe it can't be ignored by the rest of the world I see you know about 50% of the American people would wish to have a cap and trade system and if China and Europe go and do it I see China's influence with the emerging world as working great great oracles there and I see that you know America will be actually left out in the cold and we'll have to climb on board the fact that the COP is taking place in Paris is cause for some degree of optimism the host country France has a global diplomatic reach and negotiating skills and prestige necessary to conclude an agreement we believe furthermore it is a real interest in the matter on the first anniversary of his election President Hollande outlined proposals for a European energy community which has long been advocated by Jacques de Laure through his institute North Europe an energy community would enable Europe to act in unison on matters as diverse as the deployment of wind and solar power the building of super grid the orderly transition from fossil fuels to renewables and of course the reduction in carbon emissions I've actually heard President Hollande speak himself very passionately about this in Abu Dhabi in January of this year and his proposal is an imaginative one now that the federal elections are the way in Germany and the free democrats have left and they had no interest in climate change they didn't believe it now you'll see either a coalition with the Greens or a grand coalition with the social democrats with Mrs Merkel of course being the chancellor so we see Germany actually moving in the right direction and we think a deal with France if France proposes something France and Germany can once again work together to reconstruct and re-reconstruct Europe the European dream may have weakened by the economic depression but as I said with France and Germany once again leading we believe that the European dream envisaged by Schumann and Monet can take on a new vigor and restore unity of purpose to Europe in place of the fragmentation that afflicts us at present it is essential that the European dream is restored for while the American dream is fading the China dream has been given new impetus by President Xi part of that dream is a harmonious world which includes a world of harmony with nature and this springs directly from the civilizing concepts of me and Xi and Guangxi which we refer to earlier on and we Europeans should match that dream and work with China to save the planet and I don't use these words lightly the planet is endangered every single part of the globe is now affected by human activity and all of it is bad even the Arctic ice cap and I was delighted to sponsor a rowboat which attempted to row the northwest passage this year it didn't make it not because the ice wasn't there but the ice was there the ice wasn't there but they faced headwinds all the way and this was the first time in history in in our human history that you could actually row or travel across water over northern Canada I can't understand how anybody can look at the evidence before their very eyes and deny the climate change is underway nor do I understand the mentality of those who acknowledge the threat but refuse to do anything about it there's been a question raised a lot in my presence lately about the temperature doesn't seem to have gone up a lot in the last few years well no but the enthalpy and here's the chemical engineer coming out the enthalpy of the atmosphere is increasing and what that means if you imagine a bucket of water there in your boiler it the temperature stays at 100 degrees but you're putting gigantic amounts of energy into the atmosphere and so the temperature doesn't change but the enthalpy of the entire of that entire volume of gases has dramatically altered and that's what we're looking at now and that's what's leading that's how it's building up currently we will see it right the temperature is the best measure of it but we haven't yet begun to describe and the scientists haven't got down the engineers aren't on board to talk about this problem of enthalpy and increasing energy in our biosphere so anyway I find this particularly obnoxious when I recall that John Tyndall a great Irish scientist from County Carlaw went to work in the Royal Institution in London and in 1861 he passed a stream or some infrared radiation through a bunch of gases oxygen and nitrogen it went through and there was no effect whatsoever when he passed it through CO2 and methane and water vapor there was almost a full absorption now we have increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from 270 which it was from the dawn of our species until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution now it's over 400 and that is absorbing energy and it doesn't matter it's no point in being climate-skeptic we might not think the world is flat out there but you know like we dealt a long time ago with the guys who said the world looks flat so anyway we've also had Jim Dougue by the way a great Irish man and he was a polymath who helped create the international panel on climate change and I believe he often spoke here Brenton when he was alive so ladies and gentlemen let me sum up by saying I've advanced five propositions for your consideration one that we've only got about 15 to 25 years to reverse carbon emissions otherwise we're faced with a catastrophe two that COP 21 had better succeed in arriving at the global agreement on capping emissions and dividing up the carbon budget three that China has proven it is seriously intent on reducing its own emissions and will play a leadership role in Paris four that the best prospects for success is for Europe to forge a strategic alliance with China and agree on an emission trading system that can act as a template for the rest of the world and five that the first step towards this alliance is for Europe to get its act together and come to Paris with the functioning emission trading scheme which mirrors that of China I hope they commend themselves to you as a strategy to avert global warming and to save the planet in the closing paragraphs of his memoir Jean Monnet finally exposed the grand motivation for his dream of Europe unites us in peace and harmony it was he wrote to create a region of the world where the people prospered in peace and which could act as an inspiration for what he called an organized world other regions he hoped would work with Europe to build this new world with those words he closed his memoirs and shortly afterwards his life that dream of his could not be more apt we need a world organized in its own defense there are only two at world powers that can provide the necessary leadership that's we in Europe and led indeed by China for these reasons I have proposed the creation of a strategic relationship between China and Europe devoted to the task of systematically cutting greenhouse gas emissions to a level that will prevent this catastrophe of climate change happening it would be alliance like no other in history but then history was never presented with such a challenge as the one that we face today thank you very much