Remarks by Prime Minister Gordon Brown to the Low Carbon Industrial Strategy Summit, 6 march 2009.
Read the transcript
The Prime Minister:
It’s a measure of the rising importance of low carbon to the future of our economy that so many distinguished business leaders are at this conference today.
Churchill once said that those who build the present in the image of the past will miss out entirely on the challenges of the future.
All of you in this room not only represent the most exciting and dynamic areas of the British economy - our low carbon industries and services - but are meeting one of the greatest challenges our societies have ever had to face.
I think when the history books are written we will look back on the extraordinary problems each country in every continent is having to deal with – an oil price crisis last year, a financial crisis this year, a climate change crisis for many years ahead – as at the core of the challenges that this new age of globalisation has thrust upon us and demand that we solve: not simply momentous events in themselves but part of the process of creating a truly global society.
20 years ago, there were 1 billion producers in the global industrial economy. Now there are 4 billion.
This is a bigger transformation than at the time of the industrial revolution, a shift of manufacturing power from the west to Asia and now in the next two decades ahead a potential doubling of world economic growth – as, instead of just being the producers of their goods, the new entrants of to the world economy become the consumers of our goods.
But this dramatic and life transforming process of global change has thrown up four problems that, if we do not solve them, will lead to a rebellion against globalisation itself: global problems that only with global action together we will be able to solve.
The four challenges are:
• To create financial stability in a world where we have global capital flows and only national supervision;
• To ensure security in an age of mobility;
• To remove poverty and to secure social justice in an age of worsening inequalities between countries;
- all problems that if we solve can make globalisation work for the people of the world –
And the great issue we are dealing with today:
• How we meet the challenge of climate change.
And if indeed the imperative to create a low carbon economy came from climate change alone it would be the most momentous and far reaching challenge we have ever faced as a world.
In fact it is an urgent imperative also because of the challenge we face in the volatility in the price of the world’s most significant commodities - oil and gas. And because of the challenges that come from the strategic security balance which make it wrong for us to ever again be dependent on oil from outside our country where many oil producing states are not stable partners.
But I believe this is a challenge tailor made for Britain.
Britain led the industrial revolution by putting to work our basic resource of coal.
We led offshore oil technologies by putting to work the great reserves of North Sea oil and gas.
And now we can lead the creation of a low carbon economy through the use of nuclear power, the vast expansion of renewables - from a position where already we are the world’s largest offshore wind power – and in the near future, I am convinced, carbon capture and storage.
So millions of the new jobs of the future can be low carbon jobs: green jobs that will inspire a new generation of school leavers about their future careers.
But we are not developing low carbon industries and services for the long term alone.
As I look round at the challenges and opportunities of our economy today, and the tasks we face ahead, I don’t think we will have the strength of recovery we need unless it is a low carbon recovery.
So the task we face is to win a very big share for Britain of a fast expanding global market for low carbon goods and services.
And I believe the nation that had the inventiveness and creativity to be the first industrial power can also lay claim to being among the first of the low carbon powers.
And because this is a national task that requires the strongest sense of national purpose and cooperation between us, right across the economy, the government is working on a new industrial strategy for the low carbon economy. So I am particularly pleased therefore that this event has been organised together with the CBI and the TUC, and that Richard Lambert and Frances O’Grady are able to be with us here today. I hope that out of dialogue we can build consensus to build a partnership for a low carbon future.
As you may have heard, I’ve been in Washington this week, and I want to report back to you something of the conversation that — in between talking about basketball and tennis, and our wives and children — I had with President Obama.
President Obama and I discussed the urgent need to secure a new post-2012 international climate change agreement, and the critical importance of the timetable to Copenhagen. As Ed Miliband can confirm from his own talks in Washington this week, it is clear that there is a tremendous focus on this in the new us administration.
It is not for me to speak on their behalf, and this is an administration fifty days old but certainly their sense of commitment and momentum on these issues - low carbon energy, energy independence and climate change - is palpable.
And this is based not on rhetoric but on the new realities that the president is creating - the $65 billion dollar low carbon stimulus package which he put to congress and which they passed two weeks ago.
As we discussed together in our meeting, the package includes significant new support for energy efficiency, renewables, carbon capture and storage, low carbon vehicles and investment in a smart grid; and the president has also asked congress to introduce a cap and trade bill this year.
So let there be no mistake — the us is now on the transition path to a low carbon economy -
Just as the European Union with our leadership and the leadership of other great countries is set on the same path to a low carbon economy.
And this is a tremendous portent for Copenhagen - the world’s two largest economies, the US and Europe, embarking together on the transition to a new energy economy - with President Obama committed, just as we are here in Britain, to an 80 per cent reduction in emissions by 2050.
So President Obama and I discussed not just our respective domestic programmes but how we can turn the present economic crisis into a global opportunity – the opportunity to tackle our over-dependence on oil and to meet the needs of energy security, climate change and job creation together.
We agreed on the imperative of laying down green infrastructure and investing in new green technologies as a route to creating jobs and growth - making this one of the key drivers of our future prosperity.
And we are not alone. In the European Union’s economic recovery plan, and in the stimulus packages of China, Japan, Australia, South Korea, France, Germany, Spain and Denmark, among others, green stimulus measures and commitments to a low carbon recovery have become widespread.
For we know that the more we are able to coordinate these measures internationally, the more confidence and certainty we will build and the more investment we will be able to bring forward. That’s why I want to construct a global ‘green new deal’ that will pave the way for a low carbon recovery and help us build tomorrow’s green economy today.
So that is the global context for today’s event. And in the government’s forthcoming low carbon industrial strategy we want to show not only how we can reduce emissions, but how we the British economy can benefit from doing so.
Over the past two years we have put in place a new framework for energy and climate change - built around our climate change act - which will drive down emissions towards our now legally-binding goals for 2020 and 2050. So now our task is to ensure that British-based firms and British-based workers supply the goods and services that will enable those reductions to be achieved. Our low carbon industrial strategy will show how we in Government will support them in doing so.
Globally, it is estimated that the market for low carbon goods and services is worth around $3 trillion, and it is expected to double over the next decade.
Today we are publishing independent research which shows that in Britain, as a result of the frameworks we have put in place, we can expect 400,000 new environmental sector jobs over the next eight years - with a total of 1.3 million people employed in these sectors by 2017.
That is an annual growth rate of 5 per cent - even with today’s economic difficulties — underlining the tremendous economic opportunities the low carbon economy provides for jobs and for our future prosperity as a nation.
So let us set a challenge to our scientists: lead the world in this great human endeavour to create a clean environment for future generations.
Let us set a challenge to business: let us compete to lead the world in the new low carbon products.
Let us set a challenge to our planners: let us build homes and buildings and businesses and then eco towns and eco cities around the vision of a low carbon environment.
And let us set a challenge to our schools: let us teach young people and inspire them that a low carbon future is the best future they can have
And let me tell you: creating the low carbon economy we need is now a national endeavour that gives us purpose for the years to come.
When Kennedy as asked in the 1960s that he would take America to the moon the head of NASA said to him ‘but I don’t think we can.’ And he replied: ‘you can now.’
We can now build a new green economy. And I ask you to join with us in building it together.
Let the skills of our scientists;
The enterprise of our business leaders;
The ambitions of our workforce;
And the aspirations of our young people
Rise to one of the greatest peace-time challenges of all, that will not only help our country prosper but will build a better, more secure and more sustainable world.
Thank you.
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