My Lords, I declare an interest as a director of the renewable energy companies listed in the Register.

The recent abrupt and startling rise of CO2 in the atmosphere means that levels are now twice as high as the previous peak some 130,000 years ago. This should make us profoundly nervous. However, putting the brake on will not be easy in a world facing rapid rises in both population and prosperity. We saw at Copenhagen just how politically difficult putting on that brake will be. That should not surprise us. As we know, the whole fabric of our economies and our societies is bound up at every turn with energy overwhelmingly produced from hydrocarbons, distributed by long-developed infrastructures and harnessed via myriad machines, technologies and devices. Changing these embedded structures and, indeed, how we live and work from day to day will be very hard and, unavoidably, costly.

We need now to explore those measures that will ease, if not eliminate, the awesome political challenge that the world faces. The biggest, though certainly not the only, opportunity is likely to be to use electricity to supply the bulk of our energy needs and to produce that electricity from nuclear and renewable sources. Carbon capture may be part of the answer, but I would not yet bet the ranch on that. Perhaps one day in the next half century fusion technology may unlock the boundless energy present in every atom and truly ride to the world's rescue, but in the near term a focus on electricity from nuclear and renewable sources is the safety-first approach.

The consequences of that are profound. Perhaps all Governments should agree a target that all the world's travel by, say, 2040 should be powered by electricity or hydrogen. That would mean electric cars, for instance, and a suitable infrastructure to support them. Perhaps China would find it easier to agree that. Though normally I am a profound believer in the virtues of market mechanisms, in this instance I think that the world will need to supplement a market framework on carbon pricing with some such agreed measures and a coherent approach to investment in research and development.

We need to focus on the enormous whole-system energy loss-some 80 per cent-that occurs between the energy source and the final productive use worldwide. We need the obligatory and internationally agreed designing-out of chronic energy inefficiency in many household devices. We need to identify what a modern national grid in a world of dispersed energy sources would look like. We need to invest in technologies that effectively and efficiently harness wave, tidal and solar power. We need to consider how to approach the manifest waste of energy-for example, empty office blocks illuminating the night. Finally, I suggest that, after the so-called chaos of Copenhagen, there is a pressing need for some new global institutions to underpin the world's efforts and to address the biggest collective challenge that this planet has yet faced.