Energy Policymaking in the UK: Ill-Informed and Incoherent

In March 2012, four former Directors of Friends of the Earth (myself, Tom Burke, Charles Secrett and Tony Juniper) wrote to Prime Minister David Cameron to warn him that the…


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The Aotearoa Circle: An Initiative for Our Times

Back in 2016, I sat down in Auckland with a very good friend of mine, Rob Fenwick, to share our frustrations at the difficulty of getting New Zealanders to understand the critical…


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2021: Make or Break For The UK’s Climate Strategy – instalment (C)

Both the Ten Point Plan and the Energy White Paper wax lyrical about the potential for CCUS (Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage), using pretty much the same kind of language…


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2021: Make Or Break For The UK’s Climate Strategy – instalment (B)

If renewables is the UK’s strongest low-carbon suit, energy efficiency in the built environment is by far the weakest. It’s absolutely critical that the UK puts efficiency at the…


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2021: Make or break for the UK’s climate strategy

For all sorts of reasons, UK politicians do at last seem to have grasped that we are in the midst of an out-and-out Climate Emergency. Despite people’s worst fears that the whole…


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Do you want the good news? Or the bad?

Six months into the pandemic, it’s anybody’s guess whether: 1. Governments are effectively using their massive recovery programmes to address the Climate and Biodiversity…


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Citizens Assemble – Government Stumbles!

Frankly, it’s been humiliating watching our Prime Minister make such a pig’s ear of hosting this year’s Conference of the Parties in Glasgow in November. This is by far and away…


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Our Next PM: a Guaranteed Climate Emergency in the Making!

This is going to be my last word on climate matters for a while – and only because I can’t stop myself thinking about what this country’s next Prime Minister will be doing to…


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Natural Capital: New Zealand Raises the Bar

I had a rather wonderful experience on Friday, listening to three Ministers in the New Zealand Government, and a handful of New Zealand business leaders, helping to launch a new…


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‘A Green Future’: Another 25 Years of Bland Platitudes?

So what are we to make of the lionising of Michael Gove by a host of people who really should know better? His speech to the Oxford Farming Conference, and his scripting of…


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