The great persuader and climate change policies

Someone who consults for JP Morgan Chase and Co and also for the Zurich Insurance Group is trying to persuade countries like China to drastically cut their carbon emissions. You may ask what JP Morgan Chase & Co and the Zurich Insurance Group have done themselves to cut carbon emissions; the answer is not very [...]

Hopes,aspirations, signals, endless reviews and consultations- the 2008 Budget

Mr Darling’s Budget has been much as I feared; it shows a Government that is good at commissioning reviews and studies but lacking the political courage to make genuinely hard decisions.  
The Budget documents states: “Tackling climate change is the most serious and pressing global environmental challenge the world faces.” True. Unfortunately the policies announced under [...]

Green Taxes, reports gathering dust, and polluters that should pay

I decided in October last year to “blog” about the environment and have posted articles almost every day since then. I called this “Ideas for the Environment” because ideas about improving life sometimes turn into real improvements and without the ideas there will be no improvements. 

No tax relief for the environment

Governments are notoriously reluctant to change. Some months ago I was talking to a Treasury official about the best ways to incentivise microgeneration and solar thermal in particular. I explained that I thought that a simple income tax allowance of the amount spent on a thermal solar system would be a good idea.
This is [...]

Gas bills - time to change the pricing structure

My gas bill came through the letterbox yesterday, and I thought I had better look at it.
My bill told me how many “units” I had used. Units are the measurement of gas at your gas meter. These are converted into kilowatt hours by first finding out how many cubic metres of gas your units [...]

Climate Change - Mr Stern and the fundamental failure of markets

Nicholas Stern economist and famed author of “the Stern Review: the Economics of Climate Change” claimed yesterday that “the problem of climate change involves a fundamental failure of markets: those who damage others by emitting greenhouse gases generally do not pay. Climate change is a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen.” 

Darling, you’re unlucky.

In January and February of this year I corresponded with Alistair Darling when he was Secretary of State for Trade about some serious failings and structural flaws in the Department of Trade and Industry’s Low Carbon Building Programme, which provided householders and not for profit organisations with some small grants to install microgeneration.  He never [...]

Gordon Brown has to choose

Bismark said, about 160 years ago that politics is the art of the possible. That Canadian economist of good Scottish stock, J K Galbraith, wrote that politics is not the art of the possible. It consists, Galbraith held, in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. It is certainly about making choices, and a former [...]

Consequences of Climate Change - what will happen?

For a year now a group of genuine experts in America have been studying climate change scenarios.  “Genuine” experts because these are not journalists and politicians pontificating on “Newsnight”, or like Nicholas Stern and Bjorn Lomberg clever economists developing a thesis. These Americans included Nobel Prize winners, professors, meteorologists, climate scientists, oceanographers, geographers as well [...]

The Climate Change Bill

Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary, has announced that the Government will amend its draft Climate Change Bill.The Bill originally set out legally binding targets for reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the UK by at least 60 per cent by 2050 and 26 to 32 per cent by 2020 based on a new system of “carbon [...]