Political Climate

To cries of ‘now you tell us,’ Yvo de Boer, the man perpetually dubbed ‘former UN climate chief’, has reportedly said ‘Discussions about [emissions] targets have become largely irrelevant in the context of the Copenhagen outcome.’ And, has reportedly also said,’ I don’t think that we’re going to see a dramatic increase in the level of ambition.’ [...]

In haste, but because we were recently asked by a climate campaigner friend; can there be a Make Poverty History (MPH) campaign for climate change? From memory, MPH persuaded its supporters in the UK to take more than 9 million separate actions (please correct us if our memory is errant) in the run up to [...]

If the Australian electorate used last week’s poll to speak out on climate change, it certainly did not do so without equivocation. With three parliamentary seats left to fill with certainty, the results to date suggest a vote evenly split between the less climate friendly Coalition and the more climate friendly Australian Labor Party (ALP). [...]

I have been reading Michael Sandel’s recent book, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? Sandel is currently hot property on the centre left in the UK. He gave the prestigious Reith Lectures in 2009, and his argument for a ‘politics of the common good’ has hit a chord amongst politicians like Ed Miliband. At the heart [...]

According to at least one US commentator, Senate climate and energy legislation is now as dead as the parrot in Monty Python’s famous sketch. Without rehearsing the possible scenarios for introducing the bill at a later stage or the ins-and-outs of ‘lame duck sessions‘ and their possible voting scenarios, why is even such an apparently [...]

An update on our most recent post – on Monday the UK’s independent statutory climate advisory group, the Climate Change Committee chaired by Adair Turner, brought out a new report on low carbon innovation. One of its main findings is

In the UK the new coalition Government is beginning to swing the spending axe, and despite that fact that this will apparently be the “greenest government ever”, low carbon innovation is not spared. A number of technology support programmes have been axed, including £12.6 million from the Carbon Trust and £2.9 million from the Low [...]

Would more security and more equality help improve climate politics? One recent analysis that has attracted a lot of attention – The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett - argues that more inequality leads to greater consumerism and individualism, which in turn is a block on co-operation to tackle climate change. Meanwhile, Ted Nordhaus and Michael [...]

What’s the right response to the politics of climate change – realism about the current impasse or holding out for the change that must surely come? A couple of weeks ago foreign policy expert Alex Evans posted a long piece on the Global Dashboard website, partly in response to an argument he was having with [...]

A primer for the last in ippr’s A Climate of Politics events series (9.00am, ippr, Tuesday 29 June 2010) In partnership with Christian Aid and WWF-UK and with technical assistance from Cisco Systems, ippr – Political Climate’s parent organisation – has been grappling with the politics of climate change (rather than climate change policy). The [...]