Environment Big Picture / Climate Change
I might well be described as a 'carbonista' -- someone obsessed by climate change and 'carbon emissions' and convinced that unusually vigorous action will be required to sort the problem out. There are surprisingly few of us.
This subsection of The Library gives a representative sample of the many different ways I have tried to come at the problem. I have had to create further subsections to help organise the material, and they can explain themselves, so click on....
Meanwhile, there are some items I would like to be more salient, because they are relevant to national debates. One concerns the recent movie Emergency Briefing, which local green associations mounted all over Britain. It seems the standard view is that anything that keeps up pressure to maintain the Net Zero goals, is worth while. I agree with this, but the movie does not appear to say much more than did Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth twenty years previously. Have we really made such little progress? Further, the movie leaves viewers with the now-standard message that ‘something must be done’, without saying what that something is. Oh well, for what it’s worth, here it is:
Comments on the Emergency Briefing. Word 2026
Well, what should we do? The following is a short catalogue of the changes I believe are necessary in environmental thinking.
A Time for Heresies. Word 2026
Back in 1995 I wrote a curious essay arguing for a global policy that ‘got everybody through’, that is, through the looming climate crisis. Sometimes people would ask, ‘through to where?’ and my somewhat facetious answer was ‘Sweden’, that is to say a stable, prosperous and secure world for everyone, ‘Sweden’ being a metaphor for a kind of modern utopia. The text for this has been lost in the mists, but later I was invited to present the same material for a conference in Stockholm under the heading ‘Mojligheter’, Swedish for ‘possibilities’. Here is the power-point version
There is an important link to the Zero-Carbon Britain studies at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT — see its own section elsewhere on this site). CAT was early off the blocks, and its analysis was ahead of its time, being largely echoed by official and academic work ten years later. It suffers from taboos on carbon capture and storage, nuclear power and improving technology, but grasps many other nettles in a way that official bodies cannot. Use this URL: http://www.zerocarbonbritain.com