Gordon Brown speech on climate change

Gordon Brown speech on climate change; Today we face another fateful choice. building a low carbon global economy demands a worldwide commitment on a comparable financial scale, requiring billions of pounds of new investment in clean energy / The climate change crisis is the product of many generations, but overcoming it must be the great project of this generation, and it will have to involve not just Europe and America but the entire community of nations / So once again leaders will have to demonstrate vision and determination - because, just as in 1945, we must understand that it is only by rising to the challenge of change that we can guarantee our prosperity and security, now and in the future / The latest report from the International Energy Agency makes clear the scale of that challenge: that if we continue with 'business as usual', by 2030: world energy demand will be 50 per cent higher than today with 80 per cent of this for fossil fuels; the average oil price will remain over 60 dollars a barrel with most oil and gas coming from unstable regions; and global carbon dioxide emissions will have risen by almost 60 per cent / And the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that such trends, unabated, would mean temperature increases by the end of this century of up to 4 degrees centigrade and sea levels rising by up to 60 centimetres - with pervasive and prolonged consequences for ecosystems, food and water supplies and human settlements / Such a catastrophe would also be the most terrible injustice, for while the richest countries have caused climate change, it is the poorest who are already suffering its worst effects / As the Stern Report shows, the economic cost of this kind of climate change - the change which the world is currently headed for - would be comparable to the economic effects of a Great Depression combined with world war, but what the Stern Report also demonstrated is that - momentous as the challenge is - m...