Climate

Tuesday

Rupert Darwall

Who’s cashing in on the climate emergency?

‘The climate transition presents a historic investment opportunity,’ says BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. ‘What the financiers, the big banks, the asset managers, private investors, venture capital are all discovering is: There’s a lot of money to be made in the creation of these new [green] jobs,’ chimes in presidential climate envoy John Kerry.  Fink concedes that the economy remains ‘highly dependent’ on fossil fuels. He also asserts that BlackRock is ‘carbon neutral today in our own operations’. It’s a claim open to challenge. ‘If a company or individual says to me they are net-zero, I know it is complete crap,’ tweeted Glen Peters, research director of the Oslo-based Centre for International Climate

Friday

James Forsyth

Britain’s battle to prevent ‘green protectionism’

The UK’s commitment to get to net zero by 2050 is going to require some difficult political choices. But it will be impossible to maintain public support for the policy if people think that climate action at home is simply leading to work moving abroad and no great reduction in the amount of carbon emitted globally. This, as I say in the Times today, is going to become an increasingly big problem in years to come. There is mounting concern about it at the top of government. If you can’t address ‘carbon leakage’, to use the rather grim technical term, you can’t deal with climate change. For Britain, the situation

Friday

James Forsyth

Alok Sharma’s difficult diplomatic task for COP26

There’s been a mini reshuffle this evening. Alok Sharma has become the full-time head of COP26, the UN climate change summit the UK is hosting in Glasgow this November, and Kwasi Kwarteng has replaced him as Business Secretary. Sharma will continue to be a full member of the Cabinet. Anne-Marie Trevelyan, who was Secretary of State for International Development until the department was merged with the Foreign Office, takes on Kwarteng’s old job as Minister of State for energy. The decision to make Sharma the full-time president of COP26 is a recognition that it simply isn’t possible to do the job while trying to hold down another position. A huge

Thursday

The Spectator

Which former prime minister earns the most for corporate speeches?

Voyage into history How did the Labour government respond to the arrival of the Empire Windrush on 22 June 1948? While the ship was at sea, Prime Minister Clement Attlee tried but failed to have it diverted to East Africa so that its passengers could work on the groundnut scheme. He later wrote to concerned MPs that it was ‘a great mistake to regard these people as undesirable or unemployables. The majority of them are honest workers, who can make a genuine contribution to our labour difficulties at the present time. It is difficult to prophesy whether events will repeat themselves, but I think it will be shown that too