Environmentalist
“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 […]
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 […]
Climate Policy failure is what David Attenborough was talking about. If we fail to keep the increase in temperature below 2 degrees centigrade, then what we are threatening is food, energy and water security, and if you can’t maintain food, energy and water security then you can’t maintain internal stability, […]
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 […]
I think the really important thing is that we are beginning to see the restoration of political momentum to the need to tackle climate change. We know what we’ve got to do, we’ve got the technology we need to solve the problem. We know that it won’t damage our economy. […]