Environmentalist
“Can we stop Climate Change?? It is too late for us to prevent the worst effects of GlobalWarming?? Why have we not acted sooner to prevent the effects of a climate breakdown? What is the relation between Climate Change and Sustainable Development? These are some of the core questions that […]
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 […]
The core argument of this lecture is that failure of climate change policy represents an existential threat to civilisation that will destroy the foundations of trust on which democracy depends. Climate change is a unique problem in human history. Climate policy success demands the local, national and geo-political cooperation that […]
REMARKS BY TOM BURKE CBE TO THE GLOBAL ENGINEERING CONGRESS INSTITUTE OF CIVIL ENGINEERS, LONDON WEDNESDAY 24TH OCTOBER 2018 Thank you for the invitation to speak to you today at such an important and timely event. I am particularly pleased to be asked to speak about financing decarbonisation. When I […]
These are anxious times. Much that we take for granted in the way the world is ordered is in flux. The brief moment when scholars talked confidently of the ‘End of History’ has passed. Change is no longer an option, to be welcomed or resisted, as a matter of […]
Published in Rio Tinto’s Review magazine, in February 2008. Mining coastal dunes for mineral sands is one of the most environmentally controversial of all forms of mining as the public furores over Saint Lucia and Madagascar make clear. Yet, as can clearly be seen at Richard’s Bay, the environmental footprint of […]
Published by Natural England (then English Nature) in June 2003. Sustainable development is a concept with a huge capacity to induce definitional constipation. Any discussion of it can be brought to an immediate halt by someone in the room asking for a definition. Few ever recover. There are now bibliographies […]