The issue of climate change is now very, very critical indeed. Let me try and explain to you frankly what I see, from the policy-makers point of view, as the two difficulties we've got to overcome and how we overcome them. //
The first is that I think there is a clear recognition round the world now that something is happening to our climate—people are experiencing it and feeling it. Nonetheless, the timeframe. over which some of these things are going to impact is certainly beyond any very short-term political cycle, and often stretches significantly into the future. That's one issue. //
And the other issue is that there has grown up round the world, a debate, that sometimes I think takes place on a quite false basis but nonetheless is there, that somehow there is a trade-off between economic growth and environmental protection, so that if we improve the protection of our environment, we may inhibit our ability to grow and to enjoy rising living standards. //
Now each of these two issues has to be confronted. How do we do that, is the real question. The first is how do we get the world to think long-term about this？ We have to continue to build a very strong base of support and agitation for change, not just in the political world but in civic society as well. I think that is enormously important, the pressure on this has got to come on governments from people, not merely on governments from their own internal mechanisms. //
We are committed to the Kyoto Protocol. We believe it is essential that we have that implemented. We in our country will abide by our Kyoto targets, but I just want to make one point to you. When I asked for an analysis to be done by David King and his colleagues of what the true scale of the challenge was, we learned that even if we were to implement the Kyoto Protocol, it falls significantly short of what we will need over the next half century if we are to tackle this problem seriously and properly. //
So even, and this is a tall order in some ways at the moment, if we succeed in getting support for the Kyoto Protocol, we are still, even having done that, only in the position of having achieved a first step. It will be an important recognition, but it is only a first step and we need to be building a clearer understanding of the fact that even with Kyoto we are still a long way short of what we actually need to do. And we've got to build support in the political institutions of which we're a part in order to make sure that case is properly understood. //
I think we have to make sure that this occupies, as an issue, a central place in political decision-making beyond any election or parliamentary cycle. It's beyond the life of any government. It's beyond the life of any passing political phase. It has to be there, central in the politics of each country, built up not just from support within government, but from support within civic society over a period of time. //
The second point is about the conflict between the supposition that we need to grow continually and that we cannot grow unless we degrade our environment. That is the importance of a Climate Group that involves not just states and cities but also business so that there are practical, clear examples of how good environmental policy is also good business policy and is right for growth. If you look in the 12 years 1990 to 2002, we in Britain cut our emissions by about 15 percent whilst we were growing at 30 percent. It is possible to do. //
Showing that cities and states and businesses can do good environmental policy and actually reap an economic benefit is enormously important because that debate about some supposed trade- off between environmental protection and economic growth is still there. We may all, in this room, believe that that argument has been resolved long ago, but I can tell you there is