from the Centre for European Reform. You're listening to an audio recording from a recent

CR event. If for some reason you can be there, you can catch up now. Enjoy. Hello everybody.

I'm Charles Grant, for those who don't know me. Welcome to this joint Friedrich Ebert Stifting

Centre for European Reform event on Europe's Climate Challenge. I'd like to thank our friends at the FES for helping us

put this conference together. I'd like to thank my colleagues, F.A. BES, for also playing a big role

in getting us all together today. Some of you were aware of a guy called Stephen Tyndale, who

used to work at the CER, who died in

very tragic circumstances a couple of years ago, but were still inspired by his memory to go

on working on climate issues, and we will continue to honour his memory by doing so.

The timing of this event is, of course, very important and very, very relevant. I think we all

agree it's a great pleasure to talk about something

other than Brexit for a few days. And over the Easter weekend, the fact that the headlines

were not about Brexit, it was actually a great relief to us all. But there is, of course,

a little bit of a link between Brexit and climate, because isn't it strange that almost

all the people who take a view that should be very hard Brexit are almost all climate change deniers, with one or two exceptions. Those two sets of people

overlap surprisingly closely. One of the ironies of Brexit is that it gives Britain the freedom

to develop its own foreign policy, unshackled by the broader European foreign policy, and yet on

most of the key international issues, even a right-wing, fairly Eurosceptic, Tory government, is

choosing to align with Europe rather than the US, on Iran, on world trade organisation, on

support for the UN and multilateral organizations, but also in

particularly on climate issues. We remain very closely lined up with the EU, not the EU, US.

Another irony is that China, though it doesn't respect our liberal democratic values in any way,

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