Environment

The immediate urgency of Brexit has helped the UK avoid much of the “green new dealism” that is currently exercising our cousins on the other side of the Atlantic.  Along with school students around the world, ours are taking time out from classes to protest the imminent arrival of an …

There is broad agreement that 2018 was the worst year yet for the environment.  According to the New York Times “The Story of 2018 Was Climate Change;” while the Washington Post informed us that: “Extreme weather in 2018 was a raging, howling signal of climate change.”  Meanwhile on this side …

In the years before the Welsh Government was granted law making powers, Wales became known as the land of the strategy document.  Perhaps because of the lyrical nature of the Welsh language, the nineteenth century resurrection of druid poetry, or all of the time spent singing in chapel choirs and …

One of the sad truths about aging is that you never notice it happening.  Sure, you can look at old photographs and trawl through distant memories and know, cognitively, that you are no longer the person that you once were.  You can notice lines and blemishes on your skin that …

In the early weeks of the Second World War the British government produced a poster that was supposed to raise the morale of the public.  The poster proclaimed that “Your sacrifice will bring us victory” (my emphasis).  Unconsciously, the authorities had given away the class-based nature of what they believed …

If it sounds too good to be true, it almost certainly is.  That, at least, is the approach I’m taking to the flurry of crowd-funder videos currently doing the rounds on social media, promoting technologies that suck carbon out of the atmosphere.  As with a raft of other faux-green technologies …

One of the biggest threats behind an increasingly likely human extinction is our tendency to compartmentalise (in order to ignore) information.  Each one of us does this unconsciously in a process that psychologist Norman Dixon referred to as “trading safety for peace of mind.”  According to Dixon, when faced with …

Every now and then a government will do the right thing for an entirely wrong reason.  A case in point is the UK government’s decision to cut the grants on electric car sales.  Environmental groups jumped on the cuts (quite correctly) as further evidence that the UK government is increasingly …

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has urged a change of pace of governmental attempts to keep global temperatures within manageable bounds.  Thus far, of course, governments have done little more than pay lip service to the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while doing nothing to actually halt …

These days a tinfoil hat is essential headwear when listening to BBC news.  Conspiracy theories of the Trump-Russia and Corbyn-antisemitism type are the order of the day; while government propaganda is largely regurgitated without question. One result is that the BBC’s flagship Radio 4 Today programme has lost more than …