Environmentalist
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 […]
Session 3: The implications of an accelerated transition to #netzero: This session will explore the implications of carbon pricing, the creation of a Carbon Club of Nations to accelerate transition, and the impact on global trade and investment in a #netzero era. Is a Carbon Club of Nations – a […]
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 […]
Nobody should be under any illusions about how bad it will be for the lives of everybody if climate policy fails. As we have been told repeatedly in the recent days by people from all over the political spectrum, and from outside politics all together, this is the decade in […]
The most important thing that the government can do is focus policy on energy efficiency, on wind and solar, and on storage of electricity and the management of the grid. At the moment it’s a bit of a “Boris blunderbuss”, there are a huge range of marginal things, rather than […]
Now that it is widely recognised that climate change does indeed pose an existential threat to civilisation, there is an accelerating search for new ideas about how best to respond. Not all of them are good. Many of these ideas are well-intentioned searches for ways to accelerate the agonisingly slow […]
It has now become commonplace for commentators to argue that climate change is an even greater threat to our future wellbeing than the pandemic. This has added to its potency as a factor shaping any forward look at the energy sector. There are now animated discussions in every major capital […]
There are quite a small number of big things, like changing the transport system, and changing the energy system, where we need the state and business together to do big things for us. But there are a huge number of small things, none of which on its own makes a […]