The Sheila McKechnie Foundation Awards 2008
I am honoured to have been shortlisted for this year’s Sheila McKechnie Foundation Environmental Campaigner Award, for my work on TEQs. The Sheila McKechnie Foundation was established in 2005 to help develop a new generation of campaigners who are tackling 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...
Reinventing collapse
As George Carlin once said, “they call it the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe in it”. At the risk of this blog becoming ‘review corner’, that seems the perfect introduction to the book I just finished reading — Dmitry...
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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