Climate Change

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. If we take Europe as an example of how the world might look and consider the different regulatory regimes and the various methods of incentivising renewable energy, we can see that great strides forward have been made in some parts of Europe, such as Germany and Spain, because they have the right framework and incentives in place and the well of money has been fed primarily by the private sector. However, as many hon. Members have said today, we in the UK, where we have tremendous natural assets, ought to be the Saudi Arabia of renewable energy. We have huge potential in our coastline and the North sea. We have amazing expertise and research and development in our universities. We have the City of London, which it is fashionable to trash, but which is a hub for raising green capital, both debt and equity, which will be vital in future. Yet we still trail lamentably behind other countries in Europe because we have not had the right framework for the past 10 years and have not been able to give businesses the confidence that they need to invest. We need to learn those lessons in a very pragmatic way and we must ensure that, at Copenhagen, we start to build the global frameworks that let us learn the lessons of the past decade or two and start to trigger the trillions of dollars that need to flow if we are to get anywhere close to our aims.