I’ve learned a lot during my month in Sweden. First, the important stuff. The Swedes take their coffee breaks very seriously, and the cardamom buns are legendary. They are even better than the Brits at queuing, but have a surprisingly anarchic approach to cycling: bikes jostle for position alongside pedestrians on the pavements.

Though I heard a lot during my visit about the unravelling of the famous social consensus, Sweden still feels like a well-ordered, egalitarian place, with investment in public services and infrastructure visible at every turn. I’ll write a separate blog about my impressions » Continue Reading.

Goodbye, DECC. I’ve known you for eight years. In that time, you created a world-leading system of national carbon budgeting, and oversaw an impressive growth of renewable energy. It wasn’t always easy – you were a minnow in the Whitehall ocean, and the site of many a pitched battle during the Coalition years. But you fought hard to demonstrate the benefits of a low-carbon transition for the UK.

And now, minnow that you were, you’ve been gobbled up by a bigger fish: the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

So, once we’ve decided how to pronounce the acronym BEIS, » Continue Reading.

Holland in the springtime. Canals, bikes, tulips and, er, Integrated Assessent Models. I’ve just spent a week at the University of Leiden’s Lorentz Centre, with an eclectic bunch of researchers and practitioners, discussing narratives of a low-carbon future.

The idea at the heart of the gathering was simple. As nearly 200 countries at last year’s Paris summit agreed, we need to reduce carbon emissions radically to avoid dangerous climate change. But working out how we do this over the coming decades is, by definition, an exercise in future-gazing – whether predictive or prescriptive. In other words, we need to » Continue Reading.

It started, as these things often do, with a late-night text. Hey Soli, I said (that’s Solitaire Townsend, founder of the brilliant Futerra). How about getting together with lots of women working in sustainability, spending a couple of days thinking properly about all that stuff that we normally chat about over whisky late at night. Like, do women have different working styles than men? Does it matter? Should we be ‘leaning in’, and what does that even mean? What if we got women together, had some honest chats, and worked out what we could do better?

Soli’s response was characteristically » Continue Reading.

Yesterday, the Prime Minister was directly asked the question that we’ve all been waiting for. Is the UK’s domestic climate policy compatible with the Climate Change Act, and the new Paris Agreement?

Government policy on carbon reduction has come under heavy fire from, well, just about everyone. The CBI, Al Gore, the Committee on Climate Change and many others have criticised recent decisions, including drastic reductions in Feed-in Tariffs, cancellation of funding for carbon capture, and privatisation of the Green Investment Bank, saying that they add up to a significant weakening of support for the low-carbon economy.

Yet » Continue Reading.