Political Climate

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 of Sandel’s philosophy Continue reading →

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 Carbon Technology Programme. This comes on top of the culling of the Regional Development Agencies, which have been champions of low carbon innovations from electric vehicles to carbon capture and storage. Continue reading →

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 Shellenberger argued in their book Break Through that a precondition for a concern with environmental sustainability is genuine economic security.

Is there evidence to support these ideas? Continue reading →

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 Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute at a recent ippr event. Here’s our perspective. Continue reading →

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 final event in a series of five focuses on creating political space for more ambitious action on climate change. We hope this post – which is our interpretation of what we’ve heard so far – is interesting in its own right, but we also hope it will help get the debate going for those attending.

What have we learnt from the series, which has looked so far at the UNFCCC process and the politics in China, the US and the EU? There are perhaps four important lessons… Continue reading →

As we said a couple of weeks ago, the Gulf oil spill is having an impact on American thinking about energy in a way that climate change has simply failed to do so far. Now Obama has declared the Deepwater Horizon disaster an “environmental 9/11”, and called for a “new future” based on clean energy. The pollution from the Gulf spill is visible, its impacts are directly attributable and immediate, and it is understood by all to be affecting livelihoods across a swathe of Southern states. In all of these ways it is different from climate change, and shows how energy policy remains dominated by energy security and pollution considerations.