BP首席执行官在stanford的演讲.doc

Speaker: Lord Browne Speech date: 26 April 2007 Venue: Stanford University, California, USA Title: BP Group Chief Executive Ladies and Gentlemen, good afternoon. I stood here 10 years ago, almost to the day, and first talked about the risk of climate change and global warming. Then, many saw that risk as a remote challenge. So, it is an enormous privilege to come back to Stanford and to speak again on the subject which I believe is the most important issue of our times - the risk of a serious shift in the earths climate with unknown consequences for human life. Now, the consensus of informed opinion is that the risk is both greater and closer than was imagined then. Ten years of great scientific work have improved our knowledge of many aspects of the issue. Id like to talk today about both the past and the future, what has happened since 1997 and what needs to happen now. Let me begin with the words I used here ten years ago, six months before the Kyoto conference. I said then: There is mounting concern about two stark facts. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising. And the temperature of the earths surface is increasing. Theres a lot of noise in the data. It is hard to isolate cause and effect. But there is now an effective consensus among the worlds leading scientists, and serious and well informed people outside the scientific community, that there is a discernible human influence on the climate, and a link between the concentration of carbon dioxide and the increase in temperature. There are still large elements of uncertainty ...but it would be unwise and potentially dangerous to ignore the mounting evidence. The time to consider the policy dimensions of climate change is not when the link between greenhouse gases and climate is conclusively proven but when the possibility cannot be discounted. We in BP have reached that point. For us, and for oil industry as a whole, those comments represented a fundamental change of direction. We ca