Environment

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Opportunistic Ed stuttering for an authentic voice

The fightback begins here. To that end, Ed Miliband is being offered plenty of advice by the swords around his throne. The Mirror trails his speech, pleased that it will be honest about Labour’s failings and inaugurate Labour’s ‘golden generation’. Tom Harris hopes that Miliband will remember that New Labour was successful because it was the party of aspiration, not just the dispossessed. Steve Richards wants Miliband to reach for Middle England by talking with an authentic voice, a simple contrivance that worked miracles for Tony Blair. However, we can add schizophrenia to psychodrama among Miliband’s afflictions. He was the author of a manifesto he immediately disowned, whilst refusing to concede

Monday

David Blackburn

Clegg must resist temptation

As Pete notes, Nick Clegg is moderating the debate over the spending review in David Cameron’s absence. It’s an unenviable task. IDS and Liam Fox have been the most cussed opponents of George Osborne, but all ministers are fighting for their budgets behind the scenes. This morning, reports suggest that Chris Huhne could break from the ranks of the silent. The Times gives details of ‘intense discussions’ over the future of nuclear clean-up and renewable energy funding, worth more than £2bn of the Energy department’s £3.4bn budget. Obviously, any reductions in environmentally friendly initiatives carry a political cost for the Liberal Democrats. Chris Huhne has already overcome the habit of

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Prepare to be nudged

‘Nudge’ posits that people can be subtly cajoled into changing their behaviour. The Cameroons were convinced nudgers at one stage. Greg Clark and Grant Shapps designed The Green Deal, a free home insulation programme to encourage green living, paid for by savings on energy bills. Then David Cameron and Steve Hilton conceived the Big Society and nudging was discarded as some unwanted puppy.    But, James Crabtree reports that nudging is back. There’s even a ‘nudge unit’ in No.10: ‘The group, whispers one insider, was first set to find alternatives to the constant regulations flowing through Whitehall, but is becoming increasingly influential. Officially titled the “behavioural insight team”, it is

Monday

Peter Hoskin

Huhne backs nuclear energy through gritted teeth

You could almost hear the thumbscrews being tightened as Chris Huhne appeared on Today this morning to back nuclear power. The Energy Secretary has an, erm, patchy history when it comes to supporting nuclear – and that fact, coupled with his less than evangelical rhetoric on the matter in government, has got plenty of industry professionals worried. So there he was reassuring us that, actually, the first new nuclear power station is still on course for 2018. And he added, gritting his teeth no doubt, that “providing there is no public money involved, there will be a majority in the House of Commons favour of nuclear power stations.” He’s probably

Tuesday

Robert Mcilveen

Forging a cheaper green policy

The debate over climate change is one of the most polarised in UK politics, between those advocating doing everything possible (no matter what the cost) and those who refuse to think about doing anything at all. If, like us, you take the view that the science tells us there are major risks from climate change – albeit with uncertainty around how bad, when and where the risks might bear out – but that costs matter, you are likely to find yourself simultaneously denounced by both sides as a ‘denialist’ and a ‘warmist’. Our new report, Greener, Cheaper explores how we can cut the costs of cutting carbon. We assume that

Saturday

Paul Johnson

Not every aspect pleases

Half a century ago I read W. G. Hoskins’s book, The Making of the English Landscape, when it first came out. It was for me an eye-opener, as it was for many people. Half a century ago I read W. G. Hoskins’s book, The Making of the English Landscape, when it first came out. It was for me an eye-opener, as it was for many people. It told us of the extent to which our landscape had been made by man, not God, and taught us to look much more observantly at it. Since then, landscape history has become a major subject. So has media and political interest in what

Saturday

David Sexton

The whirlwind and the saint

Dave Eggers is the very model of the engaged writer. Since publishing his first book, the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, he has branched out into all kinds of philanthropic literary activity. His organisation, McSweeney’s, has become a major imprint, championing emerging writers. In San Francisco, he has set up a community writing project, called 826 Valencia, which now has branches in six other cities. In 2004, he created Voice of Witness, ‘a series of books that use oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world’. In one project, people talked about their experiences in Hurricane Katrina and that was where he first read the story

Saturday

William Leith

Brutal and brutalising

In this book, Jonathan Safran Foer, the American novelist, tries to make us think about eating meat. He ate meat, then became a vegetarian, then ate meat again, then got a dog, then started to worry about eating animals, and didn’t stop worrying. This book is the result of what happens if you start to worry about eating animals, which is what most of us do, but then carry on worrying, which is what most of us don’t do. It’s horrifying. He starts off by thinking about why we don’t eat dogs. Well, we’d hate to do that, wouldn’t we? They’re dogs, for God’s sake. They are ‘companion animals’. We

Friday

Daniel Korski

Dealing with China in 2010

The execution of Akmal Shaikh has brought China to our frontpages, and to the forefront of diplomatic thinking, as the New Year begins. The question is not just how to respond to this single and, in many regards, sad event – but how to deal with growing Chinese power more generally. How will we shape our relations with China for this decade and beyond? It would obviously be wrong to end all UK-China links over Akmal Shaikh’s execution. The Labour government’s use of pique as a guiding principle of foreign policy had little effect on Russia and will not move China. Nor should anger over the excecution – however righteous

Sunday

Daniel Korski

I blame Bono for the Copenhagen failure

So who or what is to blame for the failure of the Copenhagen gathering to achieve what most people hoped for? Polly Toynbee says that the nature of politics is to blame. Personally I blame U2’s Bono. I don’t blame him for the failure of world leaders to agree a legally-binding agreement, of course. But I do blame him for the unrealistic expectations that were raised in the run-up to the meeting. Issue-based campaigning, of which the climate change movement is the latest example, came into its own with the debt-relief campaign of Jubilee 2000, which the Irish singer spearheaded. Since then, every global issue has been approached in much

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

The truth about global warming

Anyone interested in climate change should buy The Spectator today. We don’t normally make such naked plugs here on Coffee House, but our global warming special has a line-up of the variety and quality which I guarantee you will find in no other British magazine or newspaper. As the FT’s Samuel Brittan says: we dare to debate. You’ve seen the piece about why the Maldives aren’t sinking, from a world-leading sea levels expert who has made six field trips to the islands. We also have the Freakonomics guys showing how geo-engineering has such potential, even though the environmentalists don’t seem interested. We unearth a never-seen-before CIA file from 1974 which

Friday

Fraser Nelson

What happens when you try to debate climate change…

Sky News invited me around for what I expected would be a civil debate on climate change at 2:30pm today – but for people like Bob Ward, there’s no such thing. He is policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the LSE. The debate proceeded along the bizarre path that these types so frequently tread. I was asked about what the climategate emails mean: I said it shows people putting spin first and science second. And raised the prospect of data manipulation. Hope replied by saying, “it’s remarkable about how the so-called sceptics have been using this as a propaganda tool to promote political end… People

Sunday

David Blackburn

The political case for environmentalism weakens

The Politics Show conducted a fascinating poll into the concerns of voters aged under 20. The Recession Generation are primarily concerned with, well, the recession. Economic recovery, public spending and tax came top of their list of priorities, closely followed by health and education. It’s clear that younger voters have exactly the same concerns as the wider population, and encouragingly for the Tories, those polled prefer David Cameron to Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg by a clear margin of 8 percentage points. The Liberal Democrats attracted only 18% of voters, indicating quite how damaging their tuition fee u-turn has been. Popular myth dictates that younger voters are consumed by tackling

Thursday

James Forsyth

Nudging us to go green

When the Tories first got interested in nudge theory in the summer of 2008 there was some sneering and questioning of what practical policy applications it had. But Grant Shapps’ speech today on the Tories’ Green Deal shows how nudging can be applied in government. Shapps proposes that consumers be reminded of the Green Deal offer – your house retrofitted to cut its energy usage at no immediate cost to you – every time they use the stores of one of the firms involved in the scheme. This should, in theory, boost take up of the scheme. The Green Deal, the brainchild of Greg Clark, is one of the Tories’

Tuesday

James Forsyth

My beef with Stern

I must admit that I despaired this morning when I heard that Nick Stern was arguing that meat eating should become socially unacceptable because of climate change. Those of us who think that climate change is happening and that human activity is a part of it have a big enough case to make without people thinking that they won’t be able to have a Sunday roast or a reviving steak if the green lobby gets its way. People are, understandably, not going to accept being told that they can’t fly, eat meat or have the heating on. The solutions to the problems posed by climate-change have to be technologically led.

Wednesday

James Scudamore

Liobams lying with rakunks

Set in the future, The Year of the Flood tells the story of the build-up to and aftermath of a pandemic known as the Waterless Flood, which all but eradicates the human race. The environment the survivors are left with is extremely inhospitable: Earth’s natural resources are long depleted, and the flora and fauna that remain are made up of genetically spliced, hybrid organisms such as rakunks (rats crossed with skunks), pigoons (hybrid pigs resembling balloons because they’re stuffed with duplicate human transplant organs), and liobams (lions forced not just to lie down with lambs but to integrate with them biologically) — not to mention soydines, chickeanpeas and beananas. Margaret

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson

An empty chair for Monbiot

Why do the high priests of climate change alarmism fear debate so much? Part of their litany is a desire to avoid coming face to face with academics or scientists who are specialists in their subject and might be able to debunk their prejudices. I actually didn’t put George Monbiot in that category, regarding him as an “informed” opponent of what I regard as global warming realism. One of the things I inherited as editor was an invitation for him to come and debate Ian Plimer, whom James Delingpole interviewed for our cover recently. Today, in what is an act of desperation for any columnist, he has published private emails

Sunday

James Forsyth

Blair is right on climate change

Ahead of Tony Blair’s launch of a report on climate change, he’s given an interview to The Sunday Times. The interviewer Jonathan Leake is highly sceptical of Blair and takes particular issue with this statement from him: “The answer to climate change,” he says solemnly, “is the development of science and technology. Yes, we will get changes in the way we consume but we will be consuming differently, not necessarily less. People are not going to return to the 19th century. The critical thing is to use the technologies we have and to incentivise the development of new ones. That is the only practical way we will make this thing

Wednesday

Interconnect

A load of hot air | 29 April 2009

As a general rule, I do not believe in reviewing bad books. Review space is limited, and the many good books that are published deserve first claim on it. But climate change is such an important subject, and — thanks to heavy promotion by that great publicist, Tony Blair — the Stern Review of the economics of climate change has become so well known (not least to the vast majority who have never read it, among whom in all probability is Mr Blair), that anything from Lord Stern deserves some attention. However, anyone looking for anything new in this rather arrogant book — all those who dissent from Stern’s analysis,

Saturday

John Michell

Barking up the wrong tree?

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, by James Lovelock He Knew He Was Right: The Irrepressible Life of James Lovelock and Gaia, by John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin James Lovelock is an English scientist, recip- ient of many awards, and he is a pleasant writer, moderate in tone and conciliatory towards his critics. In the late 1960s he became famous in New Age circles for his Gaia theory. The name, which is that of the old Greek goddess of Earth, was suggested to him by William Golding, his neighbour and pub companion in their Wiltshire village. It was immediately popular, and so was the image that Lovelock attached