Copenhagen Climate Change Conference

I think—[Interruption.] Well, I was certainly in the Conservative party in 1997. On questions like that, I suggest that the hon. Lady asks her own Front-Bench team for factual information; I am sure they will be happy to oblige. Let me make some more progress. Copenhagen will be seen by many as a fork in the road—and to some extent it will be, because trillions of dollars are waiting to be committed one way or the other, with investors looking to the world's leaders to set a clear direction. I therefore agreed with the Danish Prime Minister when he said last month that the meeting in Copenhagen""may be one of the most important meetings of this new millennium—a meeting where we cannot afford to fail"." The worst kind of failure at Copenhagen, however, would be failure dressed up as success, by which I mean an agreement that literally promised the earth without achieving the action required of every major emitting nation, including those in the developing world. A fake deal would eventually be exposed for what it was, but by that point, precious time would have been lost. Of course, it is in the nature of international summitry to blur the line between success and failure. We saw a prime example at last week's G8 summit in Italy, where on the face of it a great success was scored when the signatories agreed to make cuts of 80 per cent. in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. However, in the small print, the agreement referred to a base year of""1990 or more recent years"." This matters because the choice of the base year can make a huge difference to the size of the carbon limits actually agreed to. For instance, between 1990 and 2007, annual emissions in the US alone increased by 1,000 million tonnes—more than the total annual emissions of Britain and France combined. We have already seen Japan attempt to use 2005 as its base year, and the same date was used by this Government when they unveiled an aviation emission target as what I regard as a fig leaf for their decision to build a third runway at Heathrow. Fiddling around with base years is just one way of moving the goal posts, but the only goal that really matters is the reduction required to keep the rise in global temperatures below 2°C.