What the US election will mean for global climate policy

A Biden victory would be a relief for climate campaigners worldwide. But would it be a game-changer for global efforts? By Dave Keating 29 Oct 2020 For many, the global climate and clean energy implications of a Joe Biden victory on 3 November can be boiled down to one campaign […]

Do we have the kind of commitment that we need to fight climate change? – Al Jazeera

Climate Change is a bit like the virus. If we don’t do enough about it now, we will have to do an awful lot more later, and it will be much more painful. The announcement from China is good, as is the recent announcement from the European Commission, that they […]

CLIMATE, THE COURT AND THE ELECTION

There is a tradition in American presidential elections of an October surprise. This is a real or created event that has the potential to make a significant late shift in voting intentions. The much-lamented death of Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, qualifies despite occurring a couple of weeks early. […]

Have BP got it right about the future of oil? – LBC

I think that BP are right about the future of oil. Amongst the international oil companies, they have put themselves out in front of realising that change is coming. Big change is coming, and they have positioned themselves very well. I noticed that, the other week, BP got praise from […]

Trump has been branded a “Climate Arsonist” – Al Jazeera

Climate change is increasingly making the fires worse. Because in a warmer atmosphere you have more water evaporating from the ocean, and that water gets cycled back, which means the velocity with which the water cycles through the earth’s system increases, and that means that exactly as we are seeing, […]

We cannot succeed in making the climate safe without democracy

We cannot succeed in making the climate safe without democracy. Attacks on democracy are therefore attacks on a safe climate wherever they occur. To stay in power despots must destroy the machinery nations use to learn from their mistakes. There is no mistake free path to a net zero world. […]

A GREEN RECOVERY NEEDS GREEN MONEY

The Prime Minister’s speech last week was an underwhelming contribution to the green recovery. The credibility of this promise, and much else, depends on what the Chancellor has to say in his speech on Wednesday. Here are four tests the speech must pass if it is to fill the hole […]

Listen to the Canaries

Outside of the global wars of the twentieth century humanity has never experienced a shock as sudden or as profound in its implications as that brought to us by the Sars-CoV-2 virus. It surprised everyone bar a very small number of medical and ecological scientists. For them, the canaries had […]

How does the coronavirus pandemic impact Earth Hour and the way that we think about climate change? – Al Jazeera

This is an enormous shock to the way that we think about ourselves in the world, and it’s a real reminder, of how important it is for us to work with each other to deal with things. It is giving us a real sense that there are no borders anymore, […]

Covid-19, Climate, Civilization

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 […]