The UK must steer the Paris Agreement out of its ‘perilous decade’ – Climate Home News

Demands for action are outstripping political will. The diplomatic task of bringing the expectations gap falls to the hosts of next year’s climate talks. By Tom Burke This is the year the global conversation on the climate changed. It is no longer a marginal issue but has joined the political […]

Are Extinction Rebellion protesters just annoying, or are they informing, and making a point? – LBC

I did an interview for LBC on Saturday 12th October with Clive Bull. The discussion was “Are Extinction Rebellion protesters just annoying, or are they informing, and making a point?” Here are some excerpts from the interview: The protesters are doing a good job of getting people’s attention, which is […]

Greta Thunberg is not being overly pessimistic about the urgency of climate change – Sky News

Here are some excerpts of the interview with Sky News about whether Greta Thurnberg’s speech about climate change was overly pessimistic: The reality is that climate change is nastier, and is happening faster than we thought it would, the dangers that everybody on the planet are facing are worse than […]

Talking about climate change on LBC

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 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 […]

How feasible is the 2050 emissions target set by the UK government? – BBC News

. . The fastest thing that we can do to get emissions down is to improve the efficiency with which we use energy, and in particular the way in which we provide heat in buildings. So that’s not really a question of people having to change their lifestyles so much […]

The future will be different – The Gas to Power Forum

REMARKS BY TOM BURKE CBE AT THE GAS TO POWER FORUM, CANARY WHARF, LONDON, APRIL 30TH 2019. The future will be different. We live in an age of disruptions. Not all of them welcome. The disruption accompanying climate change is the most unwelcome of all. This was made very clear […]

HOW TO DEAL WITH A CLIMATE EMERGENCY – IN ADMIRATION OF THE CLIMATE STRIKERS.

Revoke Brexit – that is the single most important thing that a British Government could do to tackle climate change as Brexit is both undermining our ability to make our own low carbon transition but also removes one of the strongest and most influential voices within the EU for higher […]

We should be very concerned that the temperature is twice what it should be at this time of year – BBC News

This is twice the temperature that you would expect at this time of year, imagine if this was the summer and we had an extreme event that raised the temperature to twice what it would normally be then people would be very worried indeed, you wouldn’t be able to go […]

Hitachi to Halt Work on Wales Nuclear Plant – BBC World Service

Japan’s Hitachi is to halt work on a nuclear plant in Wales amid rising cost concerns. Tom Burke is chairman of the environmental research group E3G, and a former UK government advisor on energy policy, and tells us why the company is pulling out. Also in the programme, ahead of […]