Category Archives: Uncategorized

So the UNFCCC juggernaut gears up again for another year. According to reports, top celebs attending COP17 in Durban include Angelina Jolie, Bono, Leonardio di Caprio, Arnold Schwarzengger and Sarah Palin. But for them, and the thousands of official delegates and NGOs who will also be there, the summit is, by common consent, very unlikely to deliver anything significant on emissions targets, and may not even deliver Continue reading →

Nice bit of satire from the delightfully named Men With Day Jobs – thanks to John Macgrath via Duncan Green.

After a long summer away, assessing options for the future of this blog, we are back. We intend to try to blog once a week, at least initially, and see if that is sustainable. First post should be up shortly, looking at the vexed question of the UK’s renewable energy policy.

Regular readers may have noted that posts have become increasingly irregular and infrequent. This is not because there isn’t anything important to blog about. It’s more that we’re indundated by the pressures that our day jobs put on us, and by the rewards and demands arising from both of us having young kids. Basically we’re suffering from the fact that blogging has no business model. So we just thought we’d let you all know that we’re taking a break over the summer. Thanks for being loyal readers, and once we’re all back from our Tuscan villas (yeah, right) in September we hope we can get back into action again.

All the best

Andrew and Matthew

One front page does not a crisis make. But the malcontent over climate change policy is growing and, with rising energy prices, can only become worse. Green campaigners shouldn’t be complacent about this because while the science and economics of climate change may largely be settled, the politics are not.

Last week’s Mail splash was a mash-up of two stories, both essentially from the same source; the Global Warming Policy Foundation. One part, which is of less interest, is based on a paper by Lord Andrew Turnbull, an economist and trustee of GWPF who served as Cabinet Secretary during the Blair years. Continue reading →

We’ve argued before on this blog that taxing wealth is a defensible approach to raising revenue for vital climate change adaptation. It’s also a potential source of capital to finance investment in the low-carbon economy.

The city of Leipzig has been playing host to the International Transport Forum’s annual summit whose background paper this year focuses on the challenge of meeting the travel needs of a future world population of 9 billion.

This graphic showing the distribution across different income groups of vehicle use in the US caught the eye of a colleague to whom I sent the paper:

It tells two stories. Continue reading →

Okay, so it’s not all about how to ‘frame’ climate change to make it more acceptable; the substance of policy matters. For instance, the unfolding debacle in the UK concerning how it meets its carbon targets and whether a renewable energy target is helpful in this regard or a hindrance is not a matter of framing but of raw policy. The debate is however playing out in a political context that could quite easily lead to support for existing policy ebbing away. So as well as addressing the policy challenges, we need to pay close attention to how people are engaged in the debate; if there was a broad concensus on the issue then backsliding would not be an option and progress would be easier (to state the obvious). Continue reading →

A couple of weeks ago, we saw an interesting comment piece by David Roberts on Grist, over across the pond. The starting point for Roberts’ piece is a new report called Climate Shift, which claims to slay some sacred cows amongst US environmentalists (with views such as: the media’s actually pretty balanced, pro-Climate Bill forces spent as much money in campaigns as their opponents etc.). But what is interesting for us about it is that he broadens out the argument, to make a point that it is far easier to get attention for controversy than for a positive agenda. Continue reading →

Hidden away in one of Andrew’s recent posts was a link to an interesting DotEarth piece about how, after a few years of intense media attention, climate change has “reverted to its near perpetual position on the far back shelf of the public consciousness — if not back in the freezer.”

For old hands in US debates about the environment, this pattern should not come as a total surprise. I’ve just had my attention drawn (hat tip to Tim Bale at Sussex Uni) to what is apparently the classic work on the “issue-attention cycle”, by the doyen of US political scientists Anthony Downs (see lovely pic left).

Entitled “Up and down with ecology”, Downs’ 1972 article lays out a public interest cycle that many major issues go through in modern political life. As Downs puts it: Continue reading →

Nuclear power has become an increasingly hot topic over the last two years, with positions shifting all over the place. A number of dyed-in-the-wool Greens have recently become converts, including George Monbiot, Mark Lynas  and Stewart Brand.  Not surprisingly, longstanding critics of environmentalists The Breakthrough Institute have been in hot debate on the topic in the US. And of course events at Fukushima have prompted lots of furious exchanges, including this from Jeremy Leggett and this from John Vidal.

Political Climate dips its toe into these stormy waters with some trepidation (which may be surprising given that we have been accused recently of being smug!). So what I offer here is in the spirit of a thought experiment. Given that there is a lot of uncertainty around the future of the  nuclear “renaissance”, there may still be a bit of time for this kind of reflection. Continue reading →