Environmentalist
Fifty years ago, extending the rule of law over the then wild frontier of the British environment was the main challenge facing environmental campaigners. Post-Brexit, the challenge we now face is protecting the rule of EU environmental law from populist politicians. Environmental law is the tool we use to balance […]
Nobody should be under any illusions about how bad it will be for the lives of everybody if climate policy fails. As we have been told repeatedly in the recent days by people from all over the political spectrum, and from outside politics all together, this is the decade in […]
The most important thing that the government can do is focus policy on energy efficiency, on wind and solar, and on storage of electricity and the management of the grid. At the moment it’s a bit of a “Boris blunderbuss”, there are a huge range of marginal things, rather than […]
Climate Policy failure is what David Attenborough was talking about. If we fail to keep the increase in temperature below 2 degrees centigrade, then what we are threatening is food, energy and water security, and if you can’t maintain food, energy and water security then you can’t maintain internal stability, […]
There are quite a small number of big things, like changing the transport system, and changing the energy system, where we need the state and business together to do big things for us. But there are a huge number of small things, none of which on its own makes a […]
I think that there has been an enormous over-reaction on the part of the press, who hate anyone trying to hold them to account. What we have is a classic example, in British politics, of a group exercising their right to protest. In this case, they are protesting against the […]
The Prime Minister’s speech last week was an underwhelming contribution to the green recovery. The credibility of this promise, and much else, depends on what the Chancellor has to say in his speech on Wednesday. Here are four tests the speech must pass if it is to fill the hole […]
I was actually rather disappointed that there weren’t more announcements this morning. It’s very good to be bringing forward getting rid of the vehicle internal combustion engine. But if we are going to ask the rest of the world to do more about climate change, we have got to meet […]
I did an interview for LBC on Sunday 13th October with Ian Payne. The discussion was “Is this the end of fracking?” Here are some excerpts from the interview: I wouldn’t claim fracking is over, it’s probably over for Cuadrilla, but there are other people seeking to do fracking in […]
Here are some excerpts from the interview with Al Jazeera, about the record temperatures that we have experienced over the last five years, and the fact that climate change is happening faster that we thought: What the WMO are saying publicly, is what climate scientists have been saying privately for […]