Climate Change

That is an important point, and I promise the hon. Gentleman that I will come to it. We need to be ambitious, and we also need to be fair in the agreement we reach, which is why finance is so important. It is worth making the point that we are asking developing countries to do not as we did, but as we say we want them to do—that is, to grow in a low-carbon way. Let me give one example: 450 million people in India are not connected to the electricity grid and we are asking the country to leapfrog over the high-carbon way of getting electricity to people and to move to a low-carbon way of doing that. I was encouraged when I was in India. It has very ambitious plans for 20 million people to get solar power and lighting, but 20 million is a long way short of 450 million. Therefore, when people ask what finance in Copenhagen is about, this is my answer: it is in part about enabling countries such as India to move further and faster, to the benefit of the world, as it will not drive up its emissions as it would if it went down the high-carbon route; and it is also, crucially, about adaptation for some of the poorest countries in the world. I know that many hon. Members feel strongly about that. In this context, the EU offer is very important. The offer is €100 billion in public and private finance by 2020, a global public finance offer of between €22 billion and €50 billion—that is a range, but it is a range that we will take into the negotiations—and global fast-start finance. The big task—let me be completely candid—is to try to get other countries to sign up to this. Europe has taken a lead, but we now need the United States and other countries to move on finance as well. That is not straightforward, but it is crucial. Let me mention in passing the issue of additionality, because it is very important. Oxfam has done very good research showing the costs if, for instance, $50 billion a year was diverted from aid budgets. That is why we have said we will use no more than 10 per cent. of the existing aid budget in order to make our climate finance contribution. We have further to go to secure such additionality commitments from other countries.