Environmentalist
At COP26 I think we did better than I’d expected and nothing like good enough, is my general feeling. I think the tone was interesting, rather than the specifics of the outcome - which everybody’s commentaries focused on - the tone was interesting, because it was a much greater sense […]
COP26 certainly wasn’t a flop. It didn’t take us to where we need to get to, but it did take us a step forward into the really hard work of delivering on the Paris Agreement. So, I think that it took us somewhere. I think what surprised people was the […]
Now that it is widely recognised that climate change does indeed pose an existential threat to civilisation, there is an accelerating search for new ideas about how best to respond. Not all of them are good. Many of these ideas are well-intentioned searches for ways to accelerate the agonisingly slow […]
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 […]
One of the hardest truths about the pandemic which so abruptly cancelled everyone’s future plans is that, even now, we do not fully understand what this means. Despite a colossal global effort we are still some way from being confident of being able to ensure public health as we release […]
If what you want to do is to get your economy to recover really fast, what you have got do to is restore purchasing power. That is your top priory. That means putting people back into jobs right away. The quickest and best way to do that, is to improve […]
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 […]
. Staff redeployed as ex-government adviser says Brexit is bad for environment . More than two-thirds of all staff employed directly by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) are working on delivering Brexit, according to official figures released by the government. The response to a freedom of […]
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 […]
Japan’s Hitachi is to halt work on a nuclear plant in Wales amid rising cost concerns. Tom Burke is chairman of the environmental research group E3G, and a former UK government advisor on energy policy, and tells us why the company is pulling out. Also in the programme, ahead of […]