Environment

The one thing that green campaigners share with economists is (with a few notable exceptions) complete blindness to energy.  This may seem an odd claim, given that most green campaigners spend their waking hours arguing for a shift from one source of energy – fossil fuels – to another – …

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin is reputed to have said, “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”  Something similar could be said of the Citizen’s Assemblies that Extinction Rebellion propose as the ideal form of government to shepherd us to the bright green promised land. Although …

The NASA image of clear skies over China during their lockdown set the scene for the media to link the Covid-19 pandemic to our (lack of) response to climate change.  Perhaps, they told us, the most crucial “lesson” learned as spring gave way to summer was that the economic concerns …

Economist John Maynard Keynes argued that it was better to pay an unemployed person to dig a hole and then fill it in again than it was to leave them idle and needing public and charitable support.  On the one hand, the “work” – albeit unnecessary to the wider economy …

Sunday’s Guardian editorial is no doubt correct when it says that: “It’s too soon to say with any confidence what impact coronavirus will have on the climate emergency. The brakes placed on economic activities of many kinds, worldwide, have led to carbon emission cuts that would previously have been unthinkable: …

In a piece for the Guardian today, columnist and rent-an-activist Owen Jones naively asks “Why don’t we treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as coronavirus?”  It isn’t even an original thought.  There are memes all over social media just now comparing the current death rate from COVID-19 (around …

Thirty years ago today, Britain experienced a severe storm not dissimilar to the ones that have swept across us in the last fortnight.  The North Wales coast was particularly badly hit, with a combination of a high spring tide, a north westerly wind and a strong storm surge driving the …

Waking this morning to the sound of a storm that seems to have been raging for a fortnight, my duvet is too warm to want to get up to see what time it is.  Instead, I tentatively extend an arm into the cold morning air and reach for the radio …

US President John F. Kennedy began the political fad of setting targets for the future when, on 25 May 1961, he persuaded the Congress to agree to the goal of landing men on the moon by the end of the decade.  On 12 September 1962 he made his more famous …

Outside the USA there is a broad consensus that climate change is real and is a consequence of successive generations of humans burning fossil fuels.  There is far less unity, though, when it comes to doing something about it.  As Larry Elliott at the Guardian explains: “For those perched at …