Tom Burke – E3G – Is offsetting green energy bills by paying households a good idea? – LBC

The government is under huge pressure in advance of Glasgow to say how it is going to deliver, and so there are loads of ideas being discussed in Whitehall, most of which will never see the light of day. I suspect that this is one of those ideas. If you […]

DEMOCRACY, LAW AND THE ENVIRONMENT – UKELA ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2021

This is a speech I gave at the UKELA annual conference 2021. In summary, I argue that the rule of law will not long survive a failure to maintain the ecological foundations of the economy. The climate is the foundation in the most imminent danger. The ecological foundations of the […]

How enthused should we be by what has been achieved at the G7? – Times Radio

We are running out of time to do things, as David Attenborough is telling us. We are not going to scale. I think leaders have got the idea of the urgency, and they have understood that we need to make the recovery a green recovery, and they have understood that […]

Climate Change and Sustainable Development – U&i Global

“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 […]

Should the government be charging in on climate change commitments? – Times Radio

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 UK is stepping up its carbon ambition to 78% emissions reduction by 2035 – BBC Radio 4

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 […]

A carbon club?

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 change threatens food, energy and water security – LBC

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, […]

Leaders mark 5 years of Paris Agreement with a web summit – France 24

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. […]

A 55% carbon cut by 2030 in the EU, is it historic? – Al Jazeera

A 55% carbon cut over the next decade by 2030 in the EU is historic. What this marks is a real acceleration of the progress going forward, and it sets a real benchmark for other countries to step up and increase their commitment in time for the summit in Glasgow […]