Pastiche Politics: Redux

The previous post on this blog looked at the bizarre relationship between former Labour government minister (now Labour Party leader) Ed Miliband, and the 10:10 founder and Age of Stupid director, Franny Armstrong. One of the most curious things that this uneasy...

8 Executions and a Funeral

Ed Miliband -- the previous government’s Secretary of State for the Department of Energy and Climate Change -- has been elected leader of the Labour Party. Hmm. This is unusual. Not only is Miliband relatively young for someone hoping to convince the voting public...

Going Green, or Growing Mould?

During my very busy spring and summer, one of the things I didn’t have time to do was look more closely at the UK’s General Election results. This post comes a bit late, but it’s worth saying, nonetheless. The election was perhaps the dullest and least inspiring in...

The Environmentalist’s Paradox that Wasn’t a Paradox

Leo Hickman, Guardian’s ‘ethical’ agony aunt, usually occupies himself with the kind of pointless, trivial, and often completely bizarre ethical questions that only trouble the most moneyed and morally-disoriented environmentalist: Which is the most eco-friendly...

Lomborg's Technology-Led Policy

Roger Pielke Jr has a post about Bjorn Lomborg's apparent turnaround on the climate issue. Specifically, his proposal for a low (starting and rising) carbon tax to fund innovation comes directly from the work of Isabel Galiana and Chris Green (in the video above) of...

What Happens When the Think-Tank is Empty of Thought?

As has been said before on this blog, environmentalism is not as much an concrete idea in itself as it is a constellation of phenomena. Its parts move independently to intersect with many other issues. One such convergence of issues is epitomised by the New Economics...

Statistical Insignificance

Statistical Insignificance 25 months ago, Andrew Simms, Policy Director of the New Economics Foundation (NEF), warned that there are only 100 months to save the planet. Writing in the Guardian today, he reminds us that there are only 75 months of his deadline...

The Grief Lectures 2010 – Part Three

In the previous two posts, I looked at the first lectures by Royal Society president, Martin Rees. This post relates to his third of four lectures, ‘What We’ll Never Know’. Lighter on the doom, it is a less dark story than the previous lectures. Indeed, Rees makes...

The Grief Lectures 2010 – Part Two

In the previous post, I looked at the first of Martin Rees Reith Lectures. The President of the Royal Society believed that there is ‘a 50 percent chance of a setback to civilisation as bad as a nuclear war, or some consequence of 21st century technology equally...

The Grief Lectures 2010 – Part One

While we were busy, the Royal Society’s diktats on climate change got the world’s oldest scientific academy into the news, again. Back when we started this blog in 2007, we found the language used by those in and around the RS to be perhaps the most peculiar...