Environmentalist
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 […]
It is really important to understand that people want to do the right thing. We have seen that throughout the covid pandemic. Most people in this country when they see that there is a problem, and boy people are they seeing that that there is a problem with the climate, […]
The Saudis, the Russians and others are not willing to agree to a phase out of coal as one of the outcomes of the COP, so we are still fighting that battle. So, what we are seeing in Naples is a small leap for man, and not the giant leap […]
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 […]
This is a speech I gave at the UKELA annual conference 2021. In summary, I argue that the rule of law will not long survive a failure to maintain the ecological foundations of the economy. The climate is the foundation in the most imminent danger. The ecological foundations of the […]
We are running out of time to do things, as David Attenborough is telling us. We are not going to scale. I think leaders have got the idea of the urgency, and they have understood that we need to make the recovery a green recovery, and they have understood that […]
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 […]
“Can we stop Climate Change?? It is too late for us to prevent the worst effects of GlobalWarming?? Why have we not acted sooner to prevent the effects of a climate breakdown? What is the relation between Climate Change and Sustainable Development? These are some of the core questions that […]
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 […]
Fifty years ago, extending the rule of law over the then wild frontier of the British environment was the main challenge facing environmental campaigners. Post-Brexit, the challenge we now face is protecting the rule of EU environmental law from populist politicians. Environmental law is the tool we use to balance […]