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Climate Change

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making that point, but we need to be realistic about where we are starting from. Whatever the politics of the matter, successive Governments have not achieved the progress that we all would like to have been made. I could have made the cheap point—which I am now going to make—that carbon emissions were falling under the Conservative Government and have risen under Labour. That is not really the point, however. The point is that we are not starting from a good place, and we all need to be realistic about that. Incidentally, I agree with the Secretary of State about the nature of the challenge. It is not just some other environmental problem but a major social problem and a huge threat to international security and the economic well-being of the world. Of course, the poorest people in the world are likely to be hit hardest and first. The United Nations has said that 150 million people in the world are already climate change refugees. If we do not tackle the issue globally, I fear that all the well-intentioned efforts behind the millennium commitments and the attempts to make poverty history may prove to be in vain.