Burn up
I have just watched the BBC’s outstanding thriller Burn Up, starring Rupert Penry-Jones, Marc Warren, Bradley Whitford and Neve Campbell (trailer available here). It is a dramatic account of the intrigue, betrayal, sex and violence surrounding characters in the...
From the Chair of the UK All Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group
My mother pointed out to me that on Saturday Colin Challen MP, Chair of the UK Government’s All Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group, had a letter published in the Guardian. After numerous other eminently sensible suggestions about how the Government should...
Lazy politics?
I find myself wondering if our current political system (like so much else in our modern culture) might be partially a product of the bonanza of abundant cheap energy we have been enjoying for the last century or two. Have we been so comfortable that the pressure has...
TEQs (downstream) or Cap and Dividend (upstream)?
In the climate policy community there is a growing debate between advocates of ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’ carbon caps (dams?). The terms draw an analogy between the flow of water in a stream and the flow of energy through an economy. ‘Upstream’ advocates want to regulate the few dozen fuel and energy companies that bring carbon into the economy, arguing that this is cheaper and simpler than addressing the behaviour of tens of millions of ‘downstream’ consumers.
At first glance this seems a convincing argument, but there is one important regard in which an upstream scheme fails — it does not engage the general populace in the changes required.
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