Copenhagen Climate Change Conference

I am grateful for my hon. Friend's intervention, because what he has mentioned is exactly the problem. If countries rebased their targets every time a different direction was indicated over a series of a few years, we would never meet our commitments. I believe that we need stability and that we need to follow the long-term consensus of the science. In this country, that means following the Climate Change Act 2008, which my hon. Friend supported, under which a committee comprising scientists and other policy makers keeps the issues rigorously under review. That is the right approach. I hope that in this regard the role of the British delegation in Copenhagen will be to unblur, as it were, the line between success and failure and to focus on clarity in the discussions. Twenty years ago, Margaret Thatcher stood before the Assembly of the United Nations and told the truth about the emerging scientific evidence on climate change. Twenty years later, the world's Governments will meet at Copenhagen and either they will agree to the necessary action or they will not—but we owe it to the people of the world to tell them which it is. Another test of whether the agreement is a success or a failure is implementation, about which the Secretary of State rightly spoke. It is ultimately implementation, not targets, that provides the surest test. When it comes to the facts on the ground, it is impossible to blur the distinction between success and failure. Either megawatts of clean energy are installed or they are not. For instance, there can be no fudging of the fact that in the decade up to 2005, the share of renewable energy in the UK went from 1 per cent. to 1.3 per cent. I hope we all agree that that is disappointing. We can recognise that for what it is—a wasted opportunity—only if we are clear about the difference between success and failure. The implementation agenda is all the more important because Copenhagen must find a way of binding in not only countries like ours, but developing countries, including those which are rapidly industrialising, such as China and India. They are not only significant contributors to global emissions, but are capable of making a real contribution to the development of a low-carbon economy both domestically and globally. We are told that these developing nations will not agree to targets. That may or may not be the case when it comes to the negotiations, but if it is the case, it is on the implementation of action plans—with regard reducing carbon intensity, for example—that this part of the global deal will stand or fall. It is therefore absolutely vital that we in the developed world can bring forward credible implementation strategies of our own to show that this can be done. Unless we do so in our countries, there seems little chance of guaranteeing that the same will happen in the developing world.