Monthly Archives: October 2010

Like a lot of other European governments, Britain’s still relatively new coalition leaders are keen on fiscal austerity, and this week will see a spending review that is expected to lay out cuts of over £65 billion over the next 6 years. The ostensible reason for all this slashing is the UK’s national debt, which has reached £1,000 billion (over 70% of GDP). Against this background, it may sound mad to argue for more public borrowing in order to pay for investments in low carbon technologies and infrastructure, but that is what I am going to do in this post. Continue reading →

We’re pretty skeptical about the political reach of the 10:10 campaign. But, thinking back to our recent post comparing Make Poverty History to climate campaigning, 10:10 is more akin to the wide and shallow nature of the former than the narrow and often unpalatably deep characteristics of the latter.

No surprise, then, that this morning, 10:10 unveiled a video that came right out of the MPH stables – made by Richard Curtis, no less. Right now, the 10:10 campaign is frantically trying to back pedal from its association with this video (so note that our link above may not work by the time you click on it).

‘No Pressure’, the title of the film, seems to have won few friends on either side of the climate debate and also to have attracted enemies. It has been derided by 350.org’s Bill McKibben, writing on the almost never funny and frequently maniacal Climate Progress. It has been branded eco-fascism by James Delingpole in the UK’s Telegraph, but then one should never take Delingpole’s pronouncements at face value. He’s what’s know as a humourist in polite circles and a piss-taker elsewhere. Continue reading →