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Climate Projections

My Lords, the noble Lord’s last suggestion was extremely interesting, and we should look at it. Something similar to it in the past has enlivened the experience of children in education and caused them to understand other parts of the world with difficulties. He is saying that this is a graphic way in which we might get the adult population more effectively linked in to problems and how they can be resolved. On the three paths, although he is not here to answer questions, I am a little tempted to ask the noble Lord just what effective action was taken in the eight years after that analysis was carried out at that famous conference in 1989. I am glad of his support for government action at all times now that we are addressing ourselves to the issue. Where are we on this? Britain continues to consume energy at levels similar to those of that period, but the big change is surely the very rapid growth of the far-eastern economies, the Chinese economy being the outstanding one. In 1989, it had not really reached the pitch that it has reached over the past decade or so. Once one starts to look at the growth rates of 12 per cent or more a year for an economy, by definition the energy consumed by that economy and the emissions contributed by that consumption of energy—particularly by the worst of all carbon producers, which on the whole China and India have tended to be—are the features that make the world position much more difficult, threatening and challenging in every way than was probably the case in the halcyon days of the noble Lord way back in 1989.