Climate Change

I assure the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson) that I took her remarks in the spirit in which they were intended. It is, indeed, important that world leaders are at Copenhagen. She made the important point that we will need such leaders in order to seal the deal, and I have repeatedly made that point to our counterparts in the United States and elsewhere. As someone who is helping to negotiate on some of these issues, I was very struck that before the leaders summit in L'Aquila in July we were making very little progress on the question of whether the major economies would sign up to the 2° target for an outcome at Copenhagen, but the intervention of leaders made it happen. That is illustrative of the role leaders can, and must, play.