First Hat Trick under Sven at City!

It was our National climate change conference today at the City of Manchester Stadium and with 120 people present it was a respectable attendance for Man City. I had been primed by colleagues on the red half of Manchester to crack a number of jokes from the Chair of the event.

We offered the tour to enable people to see where City scored their goal from last season and a chance to see the video of the 20 greatest throw ins. I did balance this by pointing out that on the late Bernard Manning's tombstone it does say I would rather be here than at Old Trafford - although I am sure that a number of United fans are quite happy with that arrangement.

Nevertheless we did have some excellent contributions with Roger Latham stealing the show by wearing four different hats during his presentation - a builders, generals, magicians and bowler. He certainly kept everyones concentration and got his message across. Barbara Morton from DEFRA also gave some quite forthright views on climate change and what action Government could take to improve the situation. Mick Lovatt from Preston also introduced a concept around establishing a carbon trading scheme and this prompted a lot of discussion.

I finished the plenaries by asking how many environmentalists it takes to change a light bulb, my answer, none - once its in it lasts forever.