The situation has got much worse because China and India are industrialising on a great scale, and so we visited China, or one of my colleagues did, to discuss pollution, and indeed I went to China myself in 1997 and discovered Beijing was totally polluted. They already had motor cars in Beijing as the Chinese got prosperous, and they were beginning to think seriously about pollution although they didn't distinguish between global warming and environmental pollution. But we spoke to the Chinese Academy of Sciences. So we produced this document and recommended, and it was important because the nuclear power stations were running down... had limited life time and the question was that we had to produce more, and that's still a serious problem because if it's not... I went to see various Government Ministers when we produced our paper and I found very little interest because unfortunately governments are... as of some years ago it's changed a bit, at least in words by Tony Blair and David King who's an Institute of Scientific Government adviser, and the... you see, they work on a short term basis. It's difficult to have strategy when governments are elected on a short-term basis. How can you do long term planning? It is a real conundrum for western... for societies, for democracies which have elections where the politicians are interested in... of course, in general terms... So actually, I wanted to call... I wanted to call this carbon tax, but my colleagues wouldn't let me called it the Grandchildren Tax, you see, as you're doing it not for currency, but for your grandchildren. Although, nowadays I would say, I'd call it the children tax because the rate at which it's happening... so we produced this document and I think we worked at it and I did... in my speeches if you've ever read them... I think almost every year I refer to global warming, rather like the Elder Cato, you know the man who says, whatever the subject being discussed in the Roman Senate was, Carthage must be destroyed, the implacable enemy of Rome! Unfortunately, the... quite a few of the younger people haven't done Latin or history at school. They don't know who the Elder Cato was, let alone the younger Cato. So I'm not sure... I may have appeared like a bit of an old fuddy-duddy talking about the Elder Cato, but I did mention it every year.
