Quotes from Barry Gardiner

The road to the Paris climate talks has been paved across decades.

Leaders get things wrong. Of course they do. They have imperfect information. They face competing political pressures. Ultimately they are human.

Public demand for better services requires increased revenue, but international market competition for capital and labour drives down the ability of any one country to raise either corporate or personal income tax.

Whilst the developed world may say it wants to see much greater commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, this may only be politically feasible if there is strong support for adaptation measures in those countries at greatest immediate risk.

The problem with climate change has always been that whilst political timeframes and economic investment timeframes work on a 3-5year cycle, the planet needs a rather longer term view.

We need to be investing in the low-carbon technologies that are creating the apprenticeships and skilled jobs of the future.

In order to properly measure the impacts of climate change on our Financial system they must first be identified and disclosed.

Normally I am clear beforehand about which single proposal in a binary choice I am going to vote for.

Years of government inaction on air pollution has got people thinking that the state cannot even protect basic public goods like clean air.

As we pump greenhouse gases into our atmosphere, the ocean absorbs carbon dioxide, making the seawater acidic and hostile for shellfish and corals.

Adaptation is the forgotten word of climate change.

If government is so keen to let local people have a veto in stopping wind farms, why does it not allow local people to say no to fracking?

Thanks to David Attenborough and 'Blue Planet 2,' we've become aware of the damage to our oceans from plastic pollution. We now know to use textile shopping bags instead of plastic, reuse coffee-cups and refuse polystyrene ones, and avoid plastic straws when ordering a drink at the bar.

Leaving the E.U. with no trade deal is the worst possible option. It will condemn British exporters to the full range of tariffs and barriers that apply under WTO rules.

After years of globalisation, disaffected populations have lost confidence that the system is fair.

As the oceans get hotter, corals also become heat-stressed and expel the algae that live on their skeletons, resulting in coral bleaching events that can wipe out entire reefs. This destroys the habitat that supports a quarter of all marine life.

It appears that President Trump wishes to disrupt the global multilateral trading system as much as possible.

The most important thing to understand about Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Change agreement is, whilst it undeniably damages the rest of the world, it does most damage to America itself.

We all know the principle that the polluter pays? Well one day I got to wondering why it is that the polluter seems to get away with it quite so often! Then it occurred to me that if the polluter is going to pay, somebody needs to tell him how much. The proper valuation of natural capital will enable us to say how much.

Like air pollution, flood risk is a threat that government should be protecting us against.

Climate change brings pressures that will influence resource competition between nations and place additional burdens on economies, societies and governance institutions around the globe. These effects are threat multipliers.

Climate change is a threat to the conditions in which our economy can function at all.

We as politicians have to understand that the greatest threats to our security are no longer conventional military ones. You cannot nuke a famine.

A Land Valuation Tax is a levy on the value of the land unimproved by buildings or other enhancement. The method is already used by insurance companies each year when they calculate your home insurance premium - they separate the cost of a total rebuild of the property from the value of the land itself.