Listen to the Canaries

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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 […]

THE FUTURE HAS BEEN CANCELLED

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This coronavirus has caused three shocks. There is a health shock the worst of which should be behind us by the end of this year if governments manage it well. There is an economic shock which will last for far longer. There is a psychological shock which we will never […]

ON MEDDLING WITH EUROPE

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                                      ‘You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone Joni Mitchell   The Second World War welded Britain into a united nation. The pre-war divisions so well portrayed in Downton Abbey […]

SPEAKING WITH A FORKED TONGUE

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  This article first appeared in Business Green   . Last month, under pressure from activist investors, Exxon issued a report to their shareholders on climate change. To no-one’s surprise they found that “none of our hydrocarbon assets are now or will become ‘stranded’”. Some saw this as an important […]

Magic and Misdirection

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  This article first appeared in the December edition of BusinessGreen magazine                 One of the more stressful moments in Britain’s history occurred in the spring of 1940. Churchill had just become Prime Minister. Rommel’s tanks were at Calais. France was about to […]

Energy lobby insiders will lead cold war against Labour

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  By Damian Carrington and Terry Macalister – The Observer Sunday 6 October 2013                 Tom Burke, a former head of Friends of the Earth who worked as special adviser to several Conservative ministers, said: “The secondments are pernicious, but the real power […]

Locked into business as usual in a changing world – ENDS Report August 2013

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  This column was first published in the ENDS Report August 2013                 Conservative Party leaders believe declaring war on the environment and aggressively promoting fracking for shale gas is to their advantage. But it is bad for business and the economy. We […]