Environmentalist
On Tuesday the UK parliament voted in favour of setting out conditions for returning to 0.7 per cent aid target. The tests it agreed make it impossible that the cuts will be reversed ahead of the crucial Cop26 summit. Indeed, the UK has not met the key test of returning […]
We will know quite soon how much of this extreme weather we are seeing can be attributed to climate change with what scientist call attribution. Our understanding of climate science now is sufficiently good for us to be able to say when there is an event like this, what is […]
The government is under real pressure to do something in advance of the Glasgow COP26 to show that is it walking the talk on climate change. There are an enormous range of things being discussed in Whitehall about how we do that. Obviously one of the key questions is what […]
This is a speech I gave at the UKELA annual conference 2021. In summary, I argue that the rule of law will not long survive a failure to maintain the ecological foundations of the economy. The climate is the foundation in the most imminent danger. The ecological foundations of the […]
We are running out of time to do things, as David Attenborough is telling us. We are not going to scale. I think leaders have got the idea of the urgency, and they have understood that we need to make the recovery a green recovery, and they have understood that […]
I think people are building a mountain of speculation on not very much in the way of fact about what is actually being proposed…The government really needs to get beyond consulting, and actually get on with coming up with a policy to deploy these boilers, there is huge support for […]
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 […]
I think it was a great tragedy for the people of Japan, that has cost them an enormous amount of money, as well as left consequences that they are finding increasingly difficult to deal with. Ten years on the still have no strategy for cleaning the mess up. It’s quite […]
We have a situation where the prime minister is asking people, as he is at the summit that Britain is hosting today of The Powering Past Coal Alliance, to do more to drive coal out of our economy. At the same time as he is opening a coal mine himself. […]
It has now become commonplace for commentators to argue that climate change is an even greater threat to our future wellbeing than the pandemic. This has added to its potency as a factor shaping any forward look at the energy sector. There are now animated discussions in every major capital […]