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In this short-lived breathing space between last week's Net Zero barrage and next week's CoP26 frenzy, it seems timely to reflect on how it all stacks up so far. After months of delay, Boris Johnson and his fractious Ministers finally moved into warp drive in issuing their Net Zero Strategy.

Listen out: ‘The American Jobs Plan will unify and mobilise the country to meet the two great challenges of our time: the climate crisis and the ambitions of an autocratic China.’ So said Joe Biden’s Press Secretary on 31st March, unveiling his new American Jobs Plan – in all its $2tn glory! That…

In March 2012, four former Directors of Friends of the Earth (myself, Tom Burke, Charles Secrett and Tony Juniper) wrote to Prime Minister David Cameron to warn him that the pro-nuclear bias of his advisors across government posed a significant risk to the Government’s ability to fashion a coherent…

Back in 2016, I sat down in Auckland with a very good friend of mine, Rob Fenwick, to share our frustrations at the difficulty of getting New Zealanders to understand the critical importance of New Zealand’s natural wealth – its soils, forests, biodiversity, rivers, coastlines, oceans and so on. We…

Both the Ten Point Plan and the Energy White Paper wax lyrical about the potential for CCUS (Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage), using pretty much the same kind of language as Ministers and fossil fuel companies have been using since the mid-1990s when the technology was first deemed to be…

If renewables is the UK’s strongest low-carbon suit, energy efficiency in the built environment is by far the weakest. It’s absolutely critical that the UK puts efficiency at the heart of its Net Zero ambition: the lower the total amount of energy required, the easier it becomes to meet that demand…