Environmentalist
Climate change is increasingly making the fires worse. Because in a warmer atmosphere you have more water evaporating from the ocean, and that water gets cycled back, which means the velocity with which the water cycles through the earth’s system increases, and that means that exactly as we are seeing, […]
We cannot succeed in making the climate safe without democracy. Attacks on democracy are therefore attacks on a safe climate wherever they occur. To stay in power despots must destroy the machinery nations use to learn from their mistakes. There is no mistake free path to a net zero world. […]
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 […]
One of the hardest truths about the pandemic which so abruptly cancelled everyone’s future plans is that, even now, we do not fully understand what this means. Despite a colossal global effort we are still some way from being confident of being able to ensure public health as we release […]
One of the things that has become very clear, in the last five years or so, is that we have a serious problem, not just with bees, but with insect life in general. We are seeing massive declines in insect populations, and they are extraordinarily important because they play a […]
If what you want to do is to get your economy to recover really fast, what you have got do to is restore purchasing power. That is your top priory. That means putting people back into jobs right away. The quickest and best way to do that, is to improve […]
Outside of the global wars of the twentieth century humanity has never experienced a shock as sudden or as profound in its implications as that brought to us by the Sars-CoV-2 virus. It surprised everyone bar a very small number of medical and ecological scientists. For them, the canaries had […]
This coronavirus has caused three shocks. There is a health shock the worst of which should be behind us by the end of this year if governments manage it well. There is an economic shock which will last for far longer. There is a psychological shock which we will never […]
This is an enormous shock to the way that we think about ourselves in the world, and it’s a real reminder, of how important it is for us to work with each other to deal with things. It is giving us a real sense that there are no borders anymore, […]
Civilisation is the thin film of order we build around the chaos of events. Courtesy of a coronavirus we are now getting a chilling reminder of just how thin that film is. It would have been inconceivable a few weeks ago that a microscopic assemblage of lipids, proteins and ribonucleic […]