This post was originally published on 23rd February 2017 and was fully updated and republished on 10th February 2019. You’ve heard it all before. Walk to work. Turn off the lights. Take a reusable coffee cup. Avoid palm oil. Don’t leave the tap...
Category - Politics
Green New Deal: A bold vision for America’s future
Something amazing is happening in American politics. Wow it felt good, and weird, to type that sentence. Not sure if you noticed, but it’s been kind of a hellish shitshow recently. Anyway… On Tuesday 13th November 2018, a group of young...
Climate change should be political but not partisan
Do you see climate change as a political issue? It’s pretty common to hear people deriding the fact that climate change is a political issue, or asserting that in fact it isn’t. I see this most in the American context, but over in my neck of...
Consultation: want the government to kill rooftop solar?
At a time when climate change and the renewable energy revolution are both accelerating and we’re not sure which one will win this insane high-stakes race, you would have thought the UK government would be pulling out the stops to encourage the...
Feeling powerless? Here’s seven types of citizen power
As we’ve recently passed the 100-year mark since some women first got the vote, I think it’s a good time to talk about citizen power. We all know power is very unequally distributed in UK and US society, and this concentration of power at the top of...
5 key turning points for global climate action in 2018
2017 was a dramatic year for climate news, wasn’t it? Trump promised to yank the US out of the Paris Agreement and scrap the Clean Power Plan. Yet this only seemed to make other countries (and US cities, states and companies) more determined...
Why we can’t rely on individuals to fix climate change
The other day I saw a tweet that had escaped its platform of birth to become a Facebook meme. I can’t find it, but it said something like: “Can we all please stop acting like ordinary people are to blame for climate change because we won’t take 5...
The 2017 climate summit: 6 things you need to know
So last week saw the finale of the 2017 climate summit – aka “COP23” for short. Yet another round of talks in the never-ending talking shop that is the global climate political process. So what? It’s easy for the annual UN...
Bossing it: The best signs from the March for Science London
What do we want? Evidence based policy! When do we want it? After peer review! My personal high point of the London March for Science must have been when someone started chanting that. So witty. So good. I attended the March for Science in London...
5 reasons the Right should be pro climate action
Lately there’s been a lot of talk about political polarisation and ideological bubbles. Brexit in the UK, Trump in America and an apparent withering of the centre ground across Europe while people increasingly go to the radical Right or Left. As...