Gordon Brown on the Copenhagen talks earlier today:
Success will require two major shifts in how we think – as policy makers, as campaigners, as consumers, as producers, as a society. The first is to think not in political or economic cycles; not just in terms of years or even decade-long programmes and initiatives. But to think in terms of epochs and eras – and how our stewardship will be judged not by tomorrow’s newspapers but by tomorrow’s children.
And the second is to think anew about how we judge success as a society. For sixty years we have measured our progress by economic gains and social justice. Now we know that the progress and even the survival of the only world we have depends on decisive action to protect that world. In the end, without environmental stewardship, there can be no sustainable prosperity and no sustainable social justice.
Over recent years the world has woken to the reality of climate change. But the fact is that we have not yet joined together to act against it. Copenhagen must be the moment we do so – a declaration of our mutual commitment as a single global society; the time, at last, when our understanding of the unavoidable interdependence of economic prosperity, social justice and environmental stewardship is transformed into common global action.
Good words from Mr Brown, linking social justice, and the environment, and acknowledging that material prosperity is not the only measure of success.
