Mrs Brundtland has featured pretty large in my life. I first met her (at some kind of a conference) in 1988, just one year after the publication of Our Common Future – more familiarly known as the Brundtland Report. I don’t think any other single...
As you can imagine, there was still quite a lot of post-Paris pixie-dust being sprinkled around in Abu Dhabi. At the first World Future Energy Summit, nine years ago, conventional oil-drenched thinking about renewables was still dominant: it would...
So where does all that upbeat, excitable buzz around renewables leave the oil and gas companies? Well, they’re still hanging in there, with exhibition stands as bullish and brazen as ever, continuing to take the line that their mainstream market...
So much for the fossil fuel lobbies. What of our dearly beloved friends in the nuclear industry? The industry has had a constant presence at the World Future Energy Summit since the start ten years ago, but this year (with the interesting exception...
Back in Abu Dhabi for the ninth World Future Energy Summit, and the eighth Award Ceremony for the Zayed Future Energy Prize, which I’ve been involved in from the start as a member of the Selection Committee. As ever, despite all the inevitable...
The Scandal of the Performance Gap in the Housing Industry Many people driving a new car have long suspected that the fuel consumption demonstrated in the manufacture’s brochure is significantly out of line with the reality of the day to day running...
Today (Tuesday 15th December) in London, we’ll be launching our Report on High Carbon Stock (HCS) forests, and the role of the palm oil industry in helping both to identify them and then to protect them. It’s a bit of a blockbuster, made up of three...
Amber Rudd, Secretary of State at DECC, was all over the media yesterday, making out that the UK had played a big part in securing the historic agreement in Paris*. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. The transparent duplicity of...
Here’s a rather staggering statistic: UK universities produce one world leader in every 50,000 graduates! I have to admit that I wasn’t aware of that improbably impressive contribution to global leadership four years ago, when I was thinking a lot...
By far the biggest boundary we have to transcend today is our compulsion to keep on transcending boundaries! Over the last 40 years, I’ve collected any number of definitions of sustainable development. One of my favourites is this: ‘To live on...
