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Musings on a Green Economy pt3: What's Working
Here's part 3 of my holiday musings on a green economy. Last time, we looked at two models of sustainability - eco-efficiency (doing more with less) and eco-system models (copying nature's solar...
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Musings on a Green Economy pt4: What Needs Fixing And How Do We Fix It?
This is the fourth and last part of my holiday musings on a Green Economy - looking at what's stopping us achieve a sustainable economy and what I suggest needs doing to break down those barriers....
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The Silent Green Majority
Photo: Critical Mass protest in Budapest 2007, source: becherpig Just dig these new public perception stats on renewable energy released by UK's Department of Energy & Climate Change (DECC): 77%...
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Shining a light on decision making
One of the benefits of having one of our household on maternity leave is that we have a steady stream of tradesmen turning up to fix all the things that have broken over the last couple of years. One...
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Green Is Working
It's a real pity that last week's Green Is Working in London demonstration didn't get the attention it deserved. The pro-growth message, the presence of telly capitalist and 'dragon' Deborah Meaden...
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Can you design a green economy?
You only have to see the repercussions of the 'Arab Spring' to see that revolutions are inherently unstable. Yet we constantly call for a 'revolution' in sustainability. Evolution is stable, but slow....
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Book Review - The Green Book: New Directions For Liberals in Government
I've been a member of the UK's third political party, the Liberal Democrats, for the best part of a decade - and an elected Councillor here in Newcastle for most of that time (full disclosure!). When I...
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Book Review: The Burning Question, Mike Berners-Lee & Duncan Clark
The central thesis of The Burning Question is that all our wonderful solutions to the climate crisis - renewables, nuclear, population control, energy efficiency - come to nowt unless about half of...
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Green: The New Normal
If I told you about a country where, last quarter, more than a third of all electricity was generated from low carbon sources, which one do you think I'd be talking about? Well I'm sat in it, and so...
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Sustainability as Core Business Strategy
The whole corporate sustainability thing emerged from the idea of 'doing the right thing' or 'social responsibility' - but a recent trend is to harness sustainability as the core business strategy to...
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Will you be a carboniferous fossil in a low carbon economy?
Kodak is often held up as the archetypal extinction of the digital age. The photographic film giant invented but rejected the product - the digital compact camera - that lead to its own downfall. Now...
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Will we get political leadership on sustainability in 2015?
The UK political conference season has come to an end, the last before the General Election scheduled for May 2015. So, with manifestos starting to take shape, and given that leadership on green...
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Message to George: "Green = Growth"
I sat through Wednesday's Autumn Statement from UK Chancellor George Osborne with increasing disappointment. Normally such a set piece speech will have at the very least a token mention of the green...
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Reasons to be cheerful (about green issues)
I had an old college chum over for dinner last week and we did a lot of reminiscing about our student days and the years of optimism post-graduation in the mid-90s - Brit Pop and all that. I made the...
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The end of the oil age?
The current economic hysteria sweeping the globe has been triggered by the sudden slump in oil prices in the last 18 months. But hold on a minute. In an oil based economy, surely these low prices...
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Peak stuff? Peak Carbon? It's happening, folks...
A headline in yesterday's Guardian stopped me in my tracks: UK consumes far less than a decade ago – 'peak stuff' or something else? From crops to energy and metals, average material consumption fell...
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Imagine...
We are clearly living in an energy revolution – coal companies collapsing, oil prices trundling along the bottom as production outstrips demand and a surge in renewable energy. But just imagine what...
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Reasons to be cheerful (pt 396)
Here's a selection of headlines from the last few days: Big Oil unexpectedly backing newest non-fossil fuels Big Oil abandons $2.5bn arctic drilling rights Saudi prince unveils sweeping plans to end...
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Will the Oil Industry collapse?
I'm reading 'Collapse' by Jared Diamond at the minute – the tale of how many civilisations just suddenly disappeared off the map. While the most famous of these was the Easter Islanders, the story of...
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Embedding Sustainability is a Banker
Fascinating article in this week's Economist, traditionally no friend of sustainability, about investing in low carbon firms. They quote research by BlackRock who found that companies in the top...
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