REMARKS BY MR TOM BURKE CBE – AT THE WORLD ENERGY COUNCIL ENERGY DAY – BERLIN – OCTOBER 1ST 2015

    The speech on Tuesday by Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England and Chairman of the Financial Stability Board is a game changer for climate change. Whatever you thought about the politics or economics of climate change yesterday is now outdated. The world really did change, […]

Energy Transition Commission – some considerations

  Shell and McKinsey have just launched a global initiative called the Energy Transition Commission. Doubts have been raised about whether the Commission as currently constructed has the integrity to make a positive contribution to the debate on how to keep the climate safe. There is a risk that this […]

Discussing climate change on LBC Radio – 14/09/15

              Last year was the hottest year on record, and this year is going to be hotter still. What the Met Office is saying is that next year will be even hotter again. People thought there had been a pause in global warming, and […]

WHAT’S IN A WORD 3

        John Hutton is Chairman of the Nuclear Industries Association. On August 24th he told the Radio 4 Today audience that  “The nuclear programme is going to be built without any state funding at all”. Sitting next to him in the studio I nearly fell off my […]

Sky News – Climate change and Obama’s trip to the Arctic

  I think giving people a picture of what’s happening now on the planet is really important, and remember what Obama is talking about is what’s happening in Alaska, but it’s also happening in the glaciers in the Himalayas, in the Alps here in Europe, in Antarctica in Greenland, and […]

Sky News – Obama gives Shell the go ahead for Arctic drilling

      Obama is going to Alaska because Alaska is on the front line of climate change, and it is where we are seeing the impacts of a changing climate on human beings really dramatically already, right now. Obama wants to draw attention to the fact that it is […]

SOMETHING IS HAPPENING HERE

  This piece first appeared in Business Green.       Environmentalists have long been vulnerable to their own passions. At times this can make us sound shrill and self-righteous. On other occasions it can blind us to political traps. The oil industry is now busy setting a big one […]

Blue Sky Thinking – BBC Radio 5 Live

          I think that government has got far too centralised, it started under Thatcher, was taken further forward by Labour, and the level of centralisation has now really got quite ridiculous. I would want to push a lot more power and authority, certainly over finance, out […]

Obama’s climate plan on Sky News – 03/08/15

        It is really important that America has now set itself out to lead on climate, and to demonstrate leading by taking action. It has been a laggard, and therefore other countries have been able to hide behind it, that shield has now been removed. I suspect […]