Environmentalist
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 […]
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 […]
The fate of the climate and the future of the law are intimately entangled. The rule of law is a crucial precondition for the success of climate policy. Climate policy failure is not inevitable but it is imminent. Avoiding failure means an end to the burning of fossil fuels by […]
Environmentalist Tom Burke considers why undermining the democratic rule of law would be destructive for the environment and all who want to protect it. Joni Mitchell wrote ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ in 1970, the year the first Earth Day launched the modern environment movement. The song’s refrain – Don’t it always […]
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 cannot succeed in making the climate safe without democracy. Attacks on democracy are therefore attacks on a safe climate wherever they occur. To stay in power despots must destroy the machinery nations use to learn from their mistakes. There is no mistake free path to a net zero world. […]
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 […]