Environmentalist
You can choose smart or stupid ways to go green, and going nuclear is one of the stupider ways. There are much smarter ways to do it. If you do it in smarter ways, then you can argue about whether the investment is a subsidy or an investment. You can […]
Boris Johnson’s announcement about Sizewell was very strange. Firstly, it was a reannouncement of money that had already been committed to helping EDF get ready to go nuclear. It wasn’t actually giving the go ahead. We are quite a long way away from giving the go ahead for Sizewell. Secondly, […]
A conversation with Stephen Colegrave of Byline Times, discussing what consequences climate policy success or failure will have on democratic systems. Without democracy, climate policy will fail. If climate policy fails democracy will die. To stay in power despots have to destroy all the machinery societies have ever invented to […]
The chancellor’s announcement that VAT will be scrapped on energy efficiency measures for homes is the right idea, it is just ten years too late to make a real difference. Before David Cameron decided to cut the ‘green crap’ we were insulating around two and a half million houses per […]
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 […]
At COP26 I think we did better than I’d expected and nothing like good enough, is my general feeling. I think the tone was interesting, rather than the specifics of the outcome – which everybody’s commentaries focused on – the tone was interesting, because it was a much greater sense […]
COP26 certainly wasn’t a flop. It didn’t take us to where we need to get to, but it did take us a step forward into the really hard work of delivering on the Paris Agreement. So, I think that it took us somewhere. I think what surprised people was the […]
We live in turbulent times. Some eight billion of us live in an increasingly connected world. The pace of technology-enabled change is accelerating. This can be both exhilarating, as new opportunities and experiences become accessible, and intimidating, as familiar places and relationships are transformed beyond recognition. This accelerating pace of […]
We don’t know that this design [for nuclear reactors from Rolls Royce], that will take three years to produce, will work. We don’t know if it will be approved by the nuclear regulators. We don’t know what the electricity from it will cost, and whether that can compete with the […]
COP26 is very serious, and we had better hope it gets somewhere because if it doesn’t get somewhere, then we are all going to be in a lot of trouble. I think three things need to come out of it. The first thing that we need to do is deliver […]