Like air pollution, flood risk is a threat that government should be protecting us against.
Barry Gardiner
The shipping industry plays a fundamental role in boosting global trade and prosperity. Maritime leaders have rightly recognised the need to invest in more energy-efficient vessels and to apply measures like slow-steaming. But to ensure a level playing field, collective action is urgently needed across the sector.
Like so many free trade deals before and since, Nafta was sold as a massive opportunity for working people and their prospects. Forecasts spoke of hundreds of thousands of new jobs in all three countries. The reality could not have been more different.
Dictators have an old trick to assess the strength of their opposition: they say something patently untrue, and then look to see who mindlessly repeats it. Those who do, they recognise as their true supporters.
Years of government inaction on air pollution has got people thinking that the state cannot even protect basic public goods like clean air.
A well-functioning judicial or education system is just as much part of the wealth of a nation as its roads, ports and factories.
The mark of a bad leader is not to make the wrong decision. It is to make no decision at all.
The direct risks from climate change are obvious: as changing weather patterns cause extremes of flood and drought, hurricanes and typhoons. These damage the physical infrastructure of buildings and bridges roads and railways. They are violent and disruptive.
The costs of solar energy across the world have come down so fast that its growth as a cheap, clean energy source has been exponential.
The media when it focuses on climate change at all, does so in terms of carbon emissions and how to reduce them. Only rarely do our leaders advance arguments about adapting our environment and our economy to the effects of climate change that are already inevitable.
Climate change brings increasingly frequent and severe weather patterns and this means more floods.
As we pump greenhouse gases into our atmosphere, the ocean absorbs carbon dioxide, making the seawater acidic and hostile for shellfish and corals.
Labour believes that every trade deal should come before parliament for a full debate on the floor of the House of Commons, with a vote at the end of that debate.
We have never believed that any potential future benefits from fracking make it acceptable for the government to bulldoze over the concerns of local communities or the very real environmental dangers that can occur as a result of weak safeguards controlling the technical process.
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.
Whether you're a banker or a botanist - the economic benefits of a clean energy revolution are compelling.
Poor decision making in government; the tragedy of short-term economic thinking; our national housing crisis: these are real 21st Century problems for our country. They are problems that can only be solved by genuinely fearless thinking about our natural environment.
We need to be investing in the low-carbon technologies that are creating the apprenticeships and skilled jobs of the future.
U.K. aid spending in India is that it ensures that we are able to work with our partners to develop their markets, business and enterprise, to boost labour standards and rights and, ultimately, to boost the incomes of the poorest which, in the long term, boosts demand for British goods and services.
Science tells us we need to keep the majority of fossil fuels in the ground, and that we must urgently invest in renewable energy, and other alternative industries. Doing so would create millions of jobs, ensure a fair transition for fossil fuel workers into new industries, and avert the most catastrophic climate breakdown.
We recognise the link between environmental failure and social injustice. When the energy sector is privatised and deregulated, it not only tends to pollute more, it also charges the poorest more per unit!
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.
Treaties negotiated with foreign powers create binding obligations on future generations that cannot be repealed in the way that domestic law can. As a consequence, the most rigorous process should be in place to scrutinise such treaties before they ever come to be ratified.
We are patriotic enough to believe there is no good reason why foreign investors from Europe cannot be expected to resolve any disputes fairly through British justice, operating through British courts. And we are European enough to think that our companies can do the same by relying on European courts.
The degradation of natural resources such as forests and freshwater has removed much of the resilience that societies formerly enjoyed.
Addressing climate change globally promotes health, education and gender equality. Addressing it domestically secures U.K. jobs and sustainable clean economic growth; it protects communities from flooding and the scandal of fuel poverty. It begins to see clean air flow in our cities and schools.
MPs should be able to debate, amend and approve a mandate for the negotiation of any trade agreement before talks start, based on an independent impact assessment of what social, economic and environmental risks might be expected.
Acidisation isn't benign - like fracking, it can pose risks to groundwater sources, and runs counter to the urgency with which we must shift away from fossil fuels.
GDP has been a con perpetrated upon the poor of the world: a measure of economic activity and not of actual wealth. What it masks is the way in which we transform their natural capital into our consumption through international rules that regard the ecosystem services upon which they rely as mere externalities.
Financial decision-makers at every level are recognising that fossil fuel investments risk their returns being undermined by stranded assets.
In the Labour Party we are absolutely united in our belief that shipping must define its 'fair share' of tackling climate change, and develop an emissions reduction plan for the sector.
The Paris Agreement is a highly significant step in tackling climate change - but a piece of paper will not save the world. It is not 'job done.'
The pluralist society must be pragmatic. It does not say that 'God is dead.' It does not say that 'God is alive.' It says if we are to answer the question of how we can live together then we must remain agnostic on all such matters - at least so far as our civic association is structured.
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.
Fear is a treacherous leader. It shrinks from the new and fails to meet the challenges of the future.
As the cost of renewables plummets, the clean energy transition is increasingly driven by the business case.
Classical economics values things by seeing how much someone will pay for them. But this is where classical economics is wrong. What it fails to account for are all the 'externalities' - the services people regard as free goods: pollination services, flood protection, climate regulation, soil stabilization, carbon sequestration.
The Tories must stop focusing on their ideological obsession with a hard Brexit and their internal party divisions and start focusing on what is best for our country and our economy. Their absurd proposal that the U.K. should become the E.U.'s tariff collector is neither practical nor palatable across the Channel.
Leaders get things wrong. Of course they do. They have imperfect information. They face competing political pressures. Ultimately they are human.
The less money you have the more likely you are to live close to polluted roads. Most of us cannot choose to move further away from a main road or add another 40 minutes to our commute so that we can live in a quiet, clean, leafy street.
Donald Trump spoke to the experience of ordinary working people when he dubbed Nafta the 'worst trade deal ever made.'
It is hard to imagine a world without bees. It would be even harder to live in it.
Trade policy can be a tool for change and progress.
After years of globalisation, disaffected populations have lost confidence that the system is fair.
We want trade agreements that aid development and increase prosperity, growth and productivity at home and in our trade partner countries.
Making the most of global trade opportunities does not mean transitioning to a low-tax, deregulatory, 'Bargain Basement' economy. It means developing a robust Industrial Strategy intertwined with a strong trade agenda.
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.
Adaptation is the forgotten word of climate change.
Climate change is real and anthropogenic; and the 5th Assessment Report of the IPCC has left the deniers little room for manoeuvre, but they are swiftly morphing into a new breed that accept the climate is changing but like to suggest this may have positive benefits.
Climate change is a threat to the conditions in which our economy can function at all.
