Environmentalist
Burning fossil fuels is what is causing the climate to change. We are seeing it on our TV screens. We are seeing what that means right now. The climate is already changing. We have a very simple thing to do if we want to stop the climate becoming a unlivable […]
We are world leaders in the sense that we have probably done more in this country to decarbonize our economy than has happened anywhere else in the world. So in that sense we are world leaders. We made the Climate Act, we set up the Climate Change Committee, and they […]
We will know quite soon how much of this extreme weather we are seeing can be attributed to climate change with what scientist call attribution. Our understanding of climate science now is sufficiently good for us to be able to say when there is an event like this, what is […]
Environmentalist Tom Burke considers why undermining the democratic rule of law would be destructive for the environment and all who want to protect it. Joni Mitchell wrote ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ in 1970, the year the first Earth Day launched the modern environment movement. The song’s refrain – Don’t it always […]
I think people are building a mountain of speculation on not very much in the way of fact about what is actually being proposed…The government really needs to get beyond consulting, and actually get on with coming up with a policy to deploy these boilers, there is huge support for […]
It is fifty years since I joined a local group of Friends of the Earth. I started as an environmentalist. What I am going to do is step back a bit and look at both some of the failures and the tensions in a wider context of the development of […]
Let’s be clear, the government hasn’t made a decision, they have made an announcement about a future decision. When that happened a long time ago with the original nuclear power station at Sizewell, it was eight years between the announcement and the decision, and then another eight years before it […]
I think the Prime Minister is right to recognise the enormous potential of offshore wind in the UK. It will be very good, not just for climate and for consumers, but also for the economy as a whole. But he does need to be careful not to overpromise. The wind […]
Climate Change is a bit like the virus. If we don’t do enough about it now, we will have to do an awful lot more later, and it will be much more painful. The announcement from China is good, as is the recent announcement from the European Commission, that they […]
I think that there has been an enormous over-reaction on the part of the press, who hate anyone trying to hold them to account. What we have is a classic example, in British politics, of a group exercising their right to protest. In this case, they are protesting against the […]