This week has been hugely exciting in the fight to combat climate change. A CCL UK contingent sat down with civil servants, journalists and energy companies on Wednesday (10 Oct 2018) to hear the hotly anticipated launch of Policy Exchange’s ‘The Future of Carbon Pricing’ report. In the same week, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on…
The Nobel Prize for Economics has been won by carbon pricing advocates, William Nordhaus and Paul Romer. This week has been a seismic shift in the fight against climate change and for CCL across the world. In the same week as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said we had to move much more…
An international conference was held in Rome in July to mark the third anniversary of Pope Francis’ landmark encyclical, “Laudato si’: On Care for our Common Home.” The two-day conference focused on the theme “Saving our Common Home and the Future of Life on Earth.” Pope Francis noted the “increasingly accurate assessments” of the scientific…
On Friday 1st August 1834 the Slavery Abolition Act, which had been passed the previous year in Parliament, came into force. The gradual freeing of slaves throughout the British Empire began and was complete by 1838 (except in India which was a few years later). The Act was principally passed not for economic or…
Twitter can be a fine thing. A while ago I chanced upon Peter Kalmus, author of ‘Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution’ and climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I was drawn to follow him because of his positive messaging about how our individual lifestyle choices do indeed count. He…
Is technology constraint the main reason we have been unable to drive carbon out of the economy? Is there a stark choice between on the one hand cutting back on our high carbon burning lifestyles in the West and on the other hand allowing global warming to damage the most vulnerable? Or are there viable…
When evangelical Christian Katharine Hayhoe is asked ‘do you believe in climate change?’, she answers, ‘no’. You’d be forgiven for thinking she’s just another religious climate denier. But you’d be wrong. Canadian-born Katharine is a professor of atmospheric science, number 15 on this year’s Fortune World Greatest Leaders list and scientific adviser to Citizens Climate…
In my last post, I wrote about how we would be more inclined to fight climate change if we focused on an immediate threat we could see: pollution. However, acting to reduce consumption only on obviously polluted days is just not enough to make a meaningful dent in UK emissions. In reality, the air in…
How can we make people care about climate change? Do we show them polar bears perched atop wobbly icebergs? Do we warn them about melting glaciers in Greenland? This seems to work, at least while we’re having the discussion. But then, they forget. They go back to their old ways. Ultimately, humans simply don’t have…
Investment company, Goldman Sachs’ recent research forecasts renewable energy to be cheaper than other forms of power by 2020. Alberto Gandolfi, from Goldman Sachs Research said, What started as a decarbonisation process – thanks to better technology – is about to become a process driven by costs and the economics. This sounds like more proof…
