At its simplest, Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) sounds like the go-to climate solution: convert your coal or gas-fired power station to burn biomass. Source that biomass from fast-growing ‘sustainable forests’, with as many new...
Back in 2018, Alex Steffen first coined the notion of PREDATORY DELAY, with reference to companies and investors who make all the right noises about addressing climate change or ecological collapse, but continue to extract profits from wholly...
For as long as I can remember, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) has been promoted as a way of making it possible for us to go on using fossil fuels without further destabilizing the climate. By capturing the emissions of from the combustion of these...
For the last six years, I’ve been following the labyrinthine proceedings of an American court case known simply as ‘Juliana v. United States’. The Plaintiffs are 21 young people who are suing their Government for violating their constitutional...
Listen out: ‘The American Jobs Plan will unify and mobilise the country to meet the two great challenges of our time: the climate crisis and the ambitions of an autocratic China.’ So said Joe Biden’s Press Secretary on 31st March, unveiling his new...
I first took an interest in Greenpeace back in 1973, before I joined Friends of the Earth, CND and the Green Party (then the Ecology Party) a year later. I’d followed the campaigns against the testing of nuclear weapons in Amchitka (one of the...
When it comes to understanding the true nature of Net Zero by 2050, I have one huge request: could everybody please stop flourishing their particular ‘get out of jail free’ cards – whether that’s a nuclear card, or a hydrogen card, or a 100%...
In March 2012, four former Directors of Friends of the Earth (myself, Tom Burke, Charles Secrett and Tony Juniper) wrote to Prime Minister David Cameron to warn him that the pro-nuclear bias of his advisors across government posed a significant risk...
Back in 2016, I sat down in Auckland with a very good friend of mine, Rob Fenwick, to share our frustrations at the difficulty of getting New Zealanders to understand the critical importance of New Zealand’s natural wealth – its soils, forests...
Fifteen months into the pandemic, we’ve all got a rough sense of the human toll in terms of number of cases and deaths – in the UK and the world. It’s not the kind of information we want assaulting our minds, but it’s all but impossible to avoid. We...
