Vince Cable Speech: Steps Towards a Low-Carbon Future  

Radical policies for the environment have long been a cornerstone of my party's identity. A year into government, and we have already achieved much. Today I will announce further steps in the right direction - with investment in both emerging green technologies and in promising British companies. The challenge of creating a low-carbon future is a pressing one, yet the thinking and analysis behind it are not new. I have been speaking and writing about environmental policies for much of my professional career as an economist. And I have never been persuaded by the pessimistic Malthusian view of resource constraints, which technological innovation has repeatedly confounded - especially in agriculture - as has the flexibility of markets. It was, in fact, a variant on the Malthusian question that inspired the Brundtland Report, which I helped to write for the...