Environmentalist
The core argument of this lecture is that failure of climate change policy represents an existential threat to civilisation that will destroy the foundations of trust on which democracy depends. Climate change is a unique problem in human history. Climate policy success demands the local, national and geo-political cooperation that […]
There are three key points I want to make about climate justice and development. The first is that climate change presents humanity with a unique challenge. We have never before faced a problem like this. There is no other problem that will impact on the security and prosperity of literally […]
Japan’s Hitachi is to halt work on a nuclear plant in Wales amid rising cost concerns. Tom Burke is chairman of the environmental research group E3G, and a former UK government advisor on energy policy, and tells us why the company is pulling out. Also in the programme, ahead of […]
Climate change is a hot topic, and Tom Burke has been at the centre of the debate from the beginning – he coined the term ‘Green Growth’ already back in the 1980s. In this interview, we talk to Tom to explore the link between climate change and the extractives. RAW […]
Energy and Systemic Risk There will soon be eight billion of us sharing this planet. All of us looking to live prosperous and secure lives in which to enjoy the extraordinary benefits that knowledge and technology are already making possible and could do so even more in the future. We […]
There’s no doubt at all that we have the technology, and if we wanted to, we could deploy it in time to avoid the kind of outcomes that David Attenborough was talking about today. So it is within our technological capacity to do it, and there is no doubt at […]
Nuclear costs have always been unmeetable, in comparison with renewables, in comparison with energy efficiency, and other ways to meet energy services, so the whole prospect for this program has never been sound.
I remind people that climate change is a disease, in a way it’s a bit like diabetes, it can be without symptoms, but it gets progressively worse if you don’t do anything about it. Every time the scientists get together a consolidate their view of what is happening to the […]
Significant weather events are becoming more frequent, and you can see in the records that extreme weather events are happening more often than they used to happen. Now we are beginning to be able to read the climate signal, that’s the bit that we can attribute specifically to climate change, […]
Think of climate change as a disease like diabetes, if you don’t do anything about it, it gets progressively worse. If we don’t do anything to stop the climate from reaching these tipping points, we will find ourselves in a world in which large parts are uninhabitable.