Environmentalist
One of the hardest truths about the pandemic which so abruptly cancelled everyone’s future plans is that, even now, we do not fully understand what this means. Despite a colossal global effort we are still some way from being confident of being able to ensure public health as we release […]
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 […]
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 […]
People really are beginning to get the message that this is serious, and for real, and it will need them to think about how to change. What individuals do will help, but it’s not where the solution lies. Individuals have got to do their bit, and actually, by and large, […]
This article was first published by the Oracle Partnership as one of a series of essays on climate change. 2019 is the year the global conversation on the climate changed. The children’s climate strikes, the arrival of Extinction Rebellion, the EU’s Green New Deal and the importance of climate change […]
Attenborough is right about how important China is, but he doesn’t seem to be very conscious of what China is already doing to tackle climate change. China is the world leader in the production of solar panels. It is the world leader on the production of electric vehicles. It is […]
At a time when truth is under systematic political attack and digital technologies are collapsing the public attention span, the publication of long data series such as the Nuclear Industry Status Report becomes increasingly important. The real world is not a headline; it does not have a half-life of 24 […]
Here are some excerpts of the interview I did for Sky News about the announcement from the National Grid that more power came from renewable sources than from fossil fuels for the first time in Britain in 2019. I think that it is a very important milestone. It means that […]
I think that what they have got to do at this round of the Summit is to agree the last bits of the rule book by which they are going to implement the agreement, and they are hung up on a couple of fairly technical points to do with the […]
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 […]