Environmentalist
REMARKS BY TOM BURKE CBE TO THE GLOBAL ENGINEERING CONGRESS INSTITUTE OF CIVIL ENGINEERS, LONDON WEDNESDAY 24TH OCTOBER 2018 Thank you for the invitation to speak to you today at such an important and timely event. I am particularly pleased to be asked to speak about financing decarbonisation. When I […]
I remind people that climate change is a disease, in a way it’s a bit like diabetes, it can be without symptoms, but it gets progressively worse if you don’t do anything about it. Every time the scientists get together a consolidate their view of what is happening to the […]
Significant weather events are becoming more frequent, and you can see in the records that extreme weather events are happening more often than they used to happen. Now we are beginning to be able to read the climate signal, that’s the bit that we can attribute specifically to climate change, […]
What Peter really did was take Greenpeace into the big league. He was an extraordinary person who combined a deep analytical intelligence with a very profound moral clarity. He was a leader, he wasn’t a manager, and he lead the organisation extremely well. He had a really good political instinct […]
Think of climate change as a disease like diabetes, if you don’t do anything about it, it gets progressively worse. If we don’t do anything to stop the climate from reaching these tipping points, we will find ourselves in a world in which large parts are uninhabitable.
These are anxious times. Much that we take for granted in the way the world is ordered is in flux. The brief moment when scholars talked confidently of the ‘End of History’ has passed. Change is no longer an option, to be welcomed or resisted, as a matter of […]
What’s going to make the difference in people’s lives, is what happens in the real economy. What we’ve seen is the financial community getting into this game because they have understood the level of risk if we don’t deal with climate change, and they are beginning to see massive […]
On November 23rd, Financial Times Energy Editor, Andrew Ward, wrote, ‘energy consumers face paying £30bn above market prices for electricity for Hinkley over the 35-year life of the contract’. He was in error. The actual additional cost to consumers is £59bn. In his defence, Mr Ward can fairly claim […]
I think what matters about the suggested increase in emissions this year, is whether it is a blip, or whether it is an actual change in the trajectory. The trajectory has been ahead of what is needed to get us on to the right path, to stay below […]
Matt Ridley is almost always wrong about the environment. His regular column in the Times is a mishmash of misinformation and malice. He dislikes environmentalists and hates their influence on public policy. His criticism, in yesterday’s column, of Michael Gove’s proposed new ‘independent’ body to ensure a post-Brexit Government […]