Climate leadership: bridging the politics/policy divide – Creative Bureaucracy Festival

Policy is a map, it’s a route map, it tells you how to get from here to there. There are many different routes, and you can examine them all and try to figure out which ones are the best routes. You use quite sophisticated tool to make a map and […]

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 […]

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 […]

Discussing government failure in controlling air pollution – Radio 4 – 2 Feb 17

                  This is the consequence of complete failure by the government to tackle a problem that it has known about for a long time. It is now in breach of our own laws about controlling air pollution, and it has known about […]

Will flood exercises better prepare us? – Sky News – 12 Sep 16

            Sky News: The Environment agency is beginning to prepare for the winter months ahead, they are training with new barriers, pumps, vehicles and drones to test their flood responses. Well, joining me now is the Chairman of Third Generation Environmentalism, Tom Burke […..] Will flood […]

Tribute to Jo Cox – ‘Where we see intolerance we must drive it out of our politics’

    Here is the full text of David Cameron’s speech. I first met Jo in Darfur in 2006 where she was doing what she was brilliant at, which was looking after and saving the lives of vulnerable refugees. And here we are today commemorating her life that’s been lost. […]

Can we really fix climate change? – LBC Radio – 07 Dec 15

          LBC: Let’s talk first to Tom Burke, environmentalist and former government advisor on the environment. Tom, good evening to you. Tell is about this summit. There are lots of important people there, it’s a big deal. There is also quite a lot of scepticism. Are […]

Blue Sky Thinking – BBC Radio 5 Live

          I think that government has got far too centralised, it started under Thatcher, was taken further forward by Labour, and the level of centralisation has now really got quite ridiculous. I would want to push a lot more power and authority, certainly over finance, out […]

Climate Security: The Next ‘Battle Ground’? – Atlantic Council event – June 17, 2015

I will be speaking at the Atlantic Council event Climate Security: The Next ‘Battle Ground’? on June 17, 2015 in Washington DC.             As the international community heads to COP21 in Paris this December, much of the public discourse focuses on the relationship between climate and the environment. […]

G7 fossil fuel pledge is a diplomatic coup for Germany’s ‘climate chancellor’ – The Guardian

  I was quoted extensively in an article in The Guardian by Karl Mathiesen on why the plan outlined by the G7 on Monday to phase out fossil fuels by the end of the century is, for some member countries, not quite as ambitious as it sounds.       Tom […]