The impact of coronavirus on the environment – France 24

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 […]

Can we have a rapid economic recovery and green investment? – Sky News

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 […]

Listen to the Canaries

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 […]

THE FUTURE HAS BEEN CANCELLED

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 […]

How does the coronavirus pandemic impact Earth Hour and the way that we think about climate change? – Al Jazeera

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, […]

Covid-19, Climate, Civilization

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 […]

Who should be running the COP26 summit? – BBC Today

You need to have somebody leading this who is seen to have the ear of the Prime Minister, and speaks with his authority, and I think Claire O’Neil didn’t really have that. So it wasn’t the wrong decision, but the way in which it was done, I don’t think inspires […]

How is the UK handling COP26? – CGTN

I think that the Prime Minister’s announcement this morning was a bit underwhelming, especially given the fact the Britain has actually been a global leader in terms of the legislation it has passed itself on climate change. So I think that we would have expected to see a bit more […]

Are government targets to tackle climate change ambitious enough? – Sky News

I was actually rather disappointed that there weren’t more announcements this morning. It’s very good to be bringing forward getting rid of the vehicle internal combustion engine. But if we are going to ask the rest of the world to do more about climate change, we have got to meet […]

Britain needs to walk its talk if we are going to lead at COP26 – Channel 4 News

I think the issue is that there was a feeling beginning to emerge, both more broadly within Whitehall, but also amongst other governments that we weren’t putting enough oomph into it. And that it needed somebody in charge of the process, leading it, who was seen to have the ear […]