Do we need some base provision from nuclear power if we are to keep the lights on? – Sky News

We don’t need nuclear power to keep the lights on, which is fortunate as nuclear power stations are unplanned offline about 25% of the time. They are also intermittent, as indeed is all generation, so it is fortunate that we don’t actually need base load power. It’s about five years […]

Warning that climate change could cause the collapse of civilisation – Sky News

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 […]

ON THE BREAKING OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROMISES

  There are a great many champions of the environment in Britain. Between them, our environmental bodies have several times the membership of all the political parties in Britain combined. They probably know rather more about the will of the people than the political leaders who somehow managed not to […]

Sky News – Discussing Al Gore’s new film on climate change “An Inconvenient Sequel” – 11 Aug 17

    Sky news: With me now in the studio is Tom Burke, a former senior adviser to the foreign secretary’s special representative on climate change, and now the chairman of third generation environmentalism, which encourages sustainable development. First of all, Mr Burke, what do you make of this documentary? […]

Will the Government energy efficiency drive work? – Sky News

    I think that this about the smartest thing that the government has done in energy policy in some time. It really does set Britain on the right trajectory for getting a low-carbon, affordable, secure electricity supply, that’s right for the twenty first century. It’s very good for consumers, […]

Hinkley Point – BBC Radio 4 – Today Program

      There is no doubt that we need electricity, we just don’t need the electricity from Hinkley at enormous cost. It’s very unreliable, we are not sure that this type of reactor will actually work. There are much better ways of achieving the security of supply we need […]

BBC World News – Is Hinkley dead? – 8 March 16

      BBC: Professor Tom Burke is the chairman of the environmental think tank E3G, he joins me now in the studio, welcome to you. Where do you think this project is floundering? Tom Burke: Well, as I listen to the President and the Prime Minister talk about how […]

Is nuclear power a ticking time bomb? – France24 Debate – 8 Mar 16

                  I think that you really want to consider much more than just the body count of deaths when you look to evaluate a complicated problem like this. This has been a social catastrophe, the people who used to live near Fukushima […]

Is there really a need for Hinkley Point to be built? – World at One – Radio 4 – 16 Feb 16

    BBC: So Is there a really need for Hinkley Point to be built? Tom Burke: There isn’t actually, there’s lots and lots more things that we can do. There is no need to replace nuclear with nuclear, or indeed with gas. We’ve got so many more options, that […]

OF OIL AND STONES

  This blog first appeared in Business Green                                 Sheikh Yamani, a former Saudi oil minister, is famous for having pointed out that the stone age did not end because we ran out of stones. […]