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Weighing War Criminals in the Balance

There is near universal consensus in the West that Vladimir Putin is a war criminal. Calls to set up a Special Tribunal under the International Criminal Court in The Hague, sooner rather than later, are growing stronger by the day. However, in the pecking order of war criminals out there, right…

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COP26 is Dead. Long Live COP27!

Glasgow is what it was: not an outright failure, but falling so far short of what is so urgently needed in the real world (1.5 degrees C and all that) as to leave almost everything still to play for – as in Sharm el-Sheikh, in a year’s time. So, is there any reason to suppose we’ll be in a…

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They Knew

For the last six years, I’ve been following the labyrinthine proceedings of an American court case known simply as ‘Juliana v. United States’. The Plaintiffs are 21 young people who are suing their Government for violating their constitutional rights in ignoring climate change, and thereby…

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Rise Up! The Power of Young People

I keep thinking what it must be like to be a young climate activist in the UK today. Greta Thunberg, inspirationally, in one ear. Blustering Boris, with all his phoney rhetoric, in the other. Memories of an uplifting ‘coming together’ in Strikes for Climate and other protests in 2019 – more or less…

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Rise Up! Confronting the Climate Emergency

The thing you have to love about Greta Thunberg’s unwavering advocacy (as currently on display on BBC1) is just that: it’s unwavering. If you’re Greta, you don’t get to have a day in full-on Climate Emergency mode, and then a week off. But that’s rare. Even the most committed activist tends,…

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Why I really didn’t like Bill Gates’s ‘How to Avoid a Climate Disaster’

So what are we to make of a guy who completely ignored climate change until 2006, only decided to ‘do more and speak out more’ in 2015, whilst continuing to invest huge sums of money in Big Oil and other carbon-intensive companies, has one of the most carbon-intensive lifestyles of any human being…

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