http://www.chrishuhne.org.uk/speecharchive.php Recent Speeches from Chris Huhne MP en-GB Chris Huhne MP http://www.chrishuhne.org.uk/ Prater Raines Ltd http://www.praterraines.co.uk/ (c) 2008 Chris Huhne MP 2008-10-12T03:10+01:00 United Kingdom http://www.chrishuhne.org.uk/speeches/000062/a_liberal_democrat_view_on_climate_change_and_localism.html Thank you for the invitation to be here today. Climate change is the issue of our times. We are literally stealing the planet from our children and our grandchildren. We can and must change course. 2007-12-04T00:00+00:00 http://www.chrishuhne.org.uk/speeches/000063/climate_change_lessons_and_opportunities.html It is an honour and a pleasure to be asked to speak tonight to this audience of business leaders and the Environment Agency in the natural history museum. 2007-11-05T00:00+00:00 http://www.chrishuhne.org.uk/speeches/000061/environment_agency_after_dinner.html It is a great pleasure to speak to you all tonight at the Natural History Museum. 2007-11-05T00:00+00:00 http://www.chrishuhne.org.uk/speeches/000060/zero_carbon_britain.html Well, it has been raining again. It looks as if normal service this summer has been resumed. It was not so good to be flooded out in Hull or Oxford or Cheltenham. I visited Hull with Carl Minns, our council leader. We talked to one pensioner who had always thought of floods as rivers overflowing, the seas rushing in. It was not like that in Hull. She sat in her front room while it rained. As she watched her favourite television programme, the filthy water mixed with sewage rose through the floor boards. Ruining first the carpet, then the furniture, and then making her homeless. Climate change means far more wild weather. 2007-09-17T00:00+01:00 http://www.chrishuhne.org.uk/speeches/000059/reconnecting_britain.html By all accounts, Monday will be an important day for constitutional reformers. The Cabinet discussed the issue on Friday. Jack Straw, the new Minister of Justice charged with constitutional reform, is due to make an announcement to MPs on Monday. Ahead of that announcement, I want today to set out what I think are the criteria of a sensible package. How will we know whether it is the real McCoy or that we have been sold a pup? 2007-06-30T00:00+01:00 http://www.chrishuhne.org.uk/speeches/000058/the_liberal_democrat_lead_on_climate_change.html Thank you first for inviting me, and thanks too for being the greenest team in local government. There's no better advertisement for Lib Dem action on the environment than Lib Dem councils. Don't believe me, but look at the Guardian survey. The Guardian does not always do us any favours. But the Guardian did find that that Lib Dems practice what we preach on green matters. We deliver. We pioneer green policies. We put our principles into practice. 2007-06-23T00:00+01:00 http://www.chrishuhne.org.uk/speeches/000057/the_green_challenge_more_radicalism_needed.html The impact of climate change on our lives and our politics can hardly be underestimated. The consensus on the science is clear: our burning of fossil fuels is leading to global warming. Melting ice caps, retreating glaciers, rising sea levels, drought, extreme storms and hurricanes, flooding: all these flow from what we know to be happening to our planet. Over the next forty years, if we are to reduce our emissions to levels that will hand on our planet to our children and grandchildren in a state that we would recognise, we will have to cut our carbon emissions by at least 60 per cent and probably by more on the basis of the latest science. Both Sweden and New Zealand have already committed themselves to going carbon neutral - absorbing as much carbon as they emit. There is a lot to be said for ambitious simplicity. 2007-03-24T00:00+00:00 http://www.chrishuhne.org.uk/speeches/000056/the_geopolitical_implications_of_climate_change.html Climate change is far from a merely environmental issue, but has important and far-reaching implications for humanity and its values. I am delighted to be asked by you to address it. Not a person, business or country will be unaffected by climate change. It is also an essential Liberal issue. It will shape the economics, politics, foreign policy and security concerns of the next forty years, and I am going to set out why. 2007-02-17T00:00+00:00 http://www.chrishuhne.org.uk/speeches/000052/better_regulation__managing_political_risk.html When I was working in the City on country risk, I was invited to participate in one of Shell's famous scenario planning sessions. There were lots of sage oil men, one of whom asked me whether I thought Norway or Nigeria was the riskier environment for them to operate in. I naturally said Nigeria, which had a bond rating so low as to be sub-terranean whereas Norway has an impeccable record of debt service. It was the wrong answer. My interlocutor said everyone in the oil business knew that Norway was far riskier because they kept changing their tax and regulatory regime. It was certainly a lesson for me. 2006-11-14T00:00+00:00 http://www.chrishuhne.org.uk/speeches/000051/the_economics_of_climate_change.html Until Sir Nick Stern's review of the economics of climate change, it would be fair to characterise the mainstream economic view on the issue as lukewarm. There was certainly acceptance of the consensus among scientists: the editor of Science himself has said that it is rare to find such a compelling consensus on any scientific debate. But Bjorn Lomborg and the economists of the so-called "Copenhagen consensus" went on to argue that nothing much needed to be done, because there were many far more pressing global priorities such as tackling world poverty. 2006-11-07T15:00+00:00 http://www.chrishuhne.org.uk/speeches/000050/wind_power_and_tackling_climate_change.html Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today. I am delighted to be able to speak the day after work began on Europe's largest wind farm in South Lanarkshire. Wind power has a crucial role in meeting our future energy needs. Wind Power and Climate change are inextricably linked, and it is in the context of climate change that I would like to talk about wind energy. It is certainly a new world when Al Gore is making movies and Arnold Schwarzenegger is making policy. 2006-10-10T00:00+01:00 http://www.chrishuhne.org.uk/speeches/000048/meaning_green_business.html It is good to be here on the twentieth anniversary of big bang. To celebrate change and success in the City which has lost none of its capacity for renewal, risk and innovation. The belief in markets - in their advantages, risks and rewards - is one reason why both the City and the British economy continue to prosper. But I worry that this Government - perhaps particularly Gordon Brown - does not instinctively understand how business and a market economy works. If he did, he would have been more careful not to add coral reef after reef to the layers of tax legislation. KPMG and PWC should have secret dinners to laud him to the skies, because he is surely the patron saint of tax accountants. The sheer weight of Butterworths tax guide shows that the UK taxes acts were a mere stripling at 4.29 kilograms in 1997 but have now reached 6.45 kilograms. That is a 50 per cent rise in nine years. 2006-09-27T20:00+01:00 http://www.chrishuhne.org.uk/speeches/000046/rural_communities_proposing_speech.html 2006 has been a bad year for rural areas. 2006-09-20T11:40+01:00 http://www.chrishuhne.org.uk/speeches/000047/making_the_climate_change_switch_a_micro_solution_to_a_macro_problem.html Conference, this is my third speech of the day. You will be getting fed up with seeing me. 2006-09-19T14:15+01:00 http://www.chrishuhne.org.uk/speeches/000043/summation_speech_from_tax_debate.html The news on Thursday was shocking. An area of Antarctic sea ice the size of Turkey has melted in just two years. Climate change is urgent. It is the challenge of our times. In a recent survey of 923 articles in science learned journals, not one was critical of the notion that we human beings are causing climate change. 2006-09-19T11:30+01:00