‘Events, dear boy, events’ have put climate change back on the agenda

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  This article piece first appeared in The Guardian on Wednesday 26 March 2014 The decline of climate change on leaders’ agendas has been reversed – not by new analysis, but two years of extreme weather                   British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, […]

MAKERS AND TAKERS

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  This article first appeared in Business Green.        The public discourse on climate policy is asymmetric. It has been dominated by the climate makers. These are the fossil fuel industries and their customers. This has led to a badly distorted portrayal of climate policy risk. As a […]

Making John Redwood angry – it’s nothing personal

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  This article first appeared in Business Green on the 17th February 2014     I recently made John Redwood MP very cross. He was so cross he accused me of making ‘a very unpleasant personal attack’ on him. He was mistaken. I did no such thing. I did, however, […]

Magic and Misdirection

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  This article first appeared in the December edition of BusinessGreen magazine                 One of the more stressful moments in Britain’s history occurred in the spring of 1940. Churchill had just become Prime Minister. Rommel’s tanks were at Calais. France was about to […]

On Killing Dragons

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  This article first appeared in the November Issue of The Ends Report                             Consistency is becoming the rarest of phenomena in public discourse. We have a government that is simultaneously increasing the planning constraints on wind […]

Third or fourth time lucky

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  This article first appeared in Business Green October 2013     There is only one decision that really matters about future nuclear reactor building in Britain and that has not yet been taken. From the amount of media hoopla surrounding the announcement on Hinkley C you could be forgiven […]

Energy lobby insiders will lead cold war against Labour

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  By Damian Carrington and Terry Macalister – The Observer Sunday 6 October 2013                 Tom Burke, a former head of Friends of the Earth who worked as special adviser to several Conservative ministers, said: “The secondments are pernicious, but the real power […]

Renewables threaten fossil fuel interests

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  This article was first published in the September edition of the ENDS Report.     A good 93% of Britons think the climate is changing. Such was the finding of a recent pollby the blog Carbon Brief. This is as close as polling can ever get to ‘everyone’. Nor […]

Labour’s plan to reform our broken energy market deserves cross-party support

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  This article first appeared in the New Statesman September 2013                   BY TOM BURKE PUBLISHED 25 SEPTEMBER 2013 16:33   Ed Miliband’s energy price freeze met with a predictable, if not always credible, response from the energy industries. Led by Angela […]

Locked into business as usual in a changing world – ENDS Report August 2013

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  This column was first published in the ENDS Report August 2013                 Conservative Party leaders believe declaring war on the environment and aggressively promoting fracking for shale gas is to their advantage. But it is bad for business and the economy. We […]