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 […]
COP26 has certainly achieved something, it’s just not achieved enough. I think we are continuing to turn the corner we started turning in Paris. We are moving from a policy where we are trying to constrain things, to one in which were increasingly trying to take the opportunities of solving […]
What Prince Charles is doing over these two weeks of COP26 is advising, warning and encouraging. He is also initiating actions in areas where is it hard to get started. The thing about any piece of innovation is that you have got to get it started. What he is able […]
I don’t think that it matters as much as some people might think that certain leaders are not physically present at COP26. The have very strong delegations here. Particularly these days, as people are very used to the idea of zoom, I don’t think it has the same significance as […]
We have just had another very powerful and timely message from the real world to politicians, about the existential threat to life, as we are used to it, that climate change poses. The message is very clear, and politicians are simply not doing enough, fast enough, to address the problem […]
I think we should be focusing on the leadership gap. What we see in this report is yet another message from the real world to the politicians that is that we are not doing enough to tackle the problem. We have the technology that we need to solve the problem, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Nobody should be under any illusions about how bad it will be for the lives of everybody if climate policy fails. As we have been told repeatedly in the recent days by people from all over the political spectrum, and from outside politics all together, this is the decade in […]