A carbon club?

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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 […]

Hydrogen kaleidoscope comes into focus

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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 […]

THE FUTURE HAS BEEN CANCELLED

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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 […]

Covid-19, Climate, Civilization

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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 […]

The Politics of Climate Change

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This article was first published by the Oracle Partnership as one of a series of essays on climate change. 2019 is the year the global conversation on the climate changed. The children’s climate strikes, the arrival of Extinction Rebellion, the EU’s Green New Deal and the importance of climate change […]

REMARKS BY TOM BURKE AT THE LAUNCH OF THE WORLD NUCLEAR INDUSTRY REPORT 2019 – CHATHAM HOUSE

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At a time when truth is under systematic political attack and digital technologies are collapsing the public attention span, the publication of long data series such as the Nuclear Industry Status Report becomes increasingly important. The real world is not a headline; it does not have a half-life of 24 […]

Global efforts to combat climate change are utterly inadequate – Sky News

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This is an excerpt of an interview I did with Sky News about the warnings from scientists that we are approaching a climate change tipping point, and that global efforts to combat climate change are utterly inadequate. The drumbeat of alarm from the scientists is growing louder all the time […]

UK political parties ramp up focus on climate change and single-use plastics in their manifestos – Bio Market Insights

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by Liz Gyekye “Climate change is now acting as a locomotive pulling a train load of other environmental issues further up the political agenda particularly among highly connected millennials.” All the UK’s main political parties have focused on the issues of tackling climate change and single-use plastics in their manifestos. […]

Talking about climate change on LBC

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Here is an excerpt from an LBC phone on climate change, I did on the day of the climate protests. Right now the single most important thing that the British government could do is invest an additional billion pounds in the energy efficiency of our dwellings, and bring them all […]

Do we understand the magnitude of the threat we face from extreme weather? – Al Jazeera

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Al Jazeera: Do we understand the magnitude of the threat of forest fires? Tom Burke: I think that we do in the headlines, but not in the real world. I think the picture is coming through pretty clearly, and it’s not just fires, there are also hurricanes and floods as […]