The doubling of oil prices ... is creating a more difficult environment in which to act.

Sometimes it takes a crisis for people to agree that what is obvious and should have been done years ago, can no longer be postponed. We must create a new international financial architecture for the global age.

Indeed, Britain was set to repeat the old, familiar cycle of boom and bust. Since then, we have created and rigorously adhered to a new framework of modern economic management

Our mission is, in truth, historic and world changing - to build, over the next fifty years and beyond, a global low carbon economy. And it is not overdramatic to say that the character and course of the coming century will be set by how we measure up to this challenge

...in just 25 years the glaciers in the Himalayas which provide water for three-quarters of a billion people could disappear entirely.

Rigorous financial discipline that, together with monetary stability, ends once and for all the boom and bust that for 30 years has undermined stability

Take, therefore, what modern technology is capable of: the power of our moral sense allied to the power of communications and our ability to organize internationally. That, in my view, gives us the first opportunity as a community to fundamentally change the world.