Lord Stern challenges people to move to a low carbon economy

Speaking at the Lionel Robbins Memorial Lectures last week, leading economist Lord Stern said that moving to a low carbon economy would create “investment, opportunity and growth”.

Lord Stern, who wrote a report in 2006 setting out the economic case to cut down greenhouse gases, pointed out that some people suggest “that we cannot afford to take action to ‘save the planet’”. But he said “low carbon growth will be full of discovery and the costs of many green technologies are falling fast”.

He warned about the importance of dealing with global warming saying a rise in temperature would cause “catastrophic rewrite of the relationship between humans and the planet within the lifetimes of those being born today”.

He also said that countries that get left behind will find that they suffer from having weak technology and will get shut out of the global market.

This comes in the week that the Blue Planet Prize group called for countries to start taking into account environmental and societal factors when measuring wealth.

The paper said, “In the face of an absolutely unprecedented emergency, society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of society, of they will be changed for us”.

It is quite clear that the time to act is now, otherwise we will have to deal with the consequences of global warming.

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Photo: Radio Nederland Wereldomroep via Flickr

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