Running Green Alliance often feels like bare back horse riding. It requires a constant appetite for danger, good balance and lots of trust. You don’t have the padding of a large public membership to keep you stable, but if you channel the support and ideas of the sector you get an exhilarating ride. Read more
As the UK heads towards the EU’s exit door, there is an urgent need for a new economic model. A recession looks likely, and even the optimists concede that the next few years will be challenging for the UK economy. Read more
This post is by Green Alliance associate Rebecca Willis, it first appeared on her blog.
I’ve never written such a grand title for a blog before. Perhaps I should just have called it ‘the inevitable Brexit blog’. But portentous times call for portentous titles; if there was ever a moment to rethink the big questions, surely this is it. Read more
The environment community is in shock. Forty years of environmental agreements with our neighbours are now threatened by a vote in which the environment didn’t feature. The electorate voted by a small margin to build higher walls, but walls don’t work in the natural world. Within the next two years we will lose the best enforced nature laws in the world, which the UK did so much to help create. Read more
Have you ever shattered your mobile phone screen? Or maybe your washing machine has packed up, and the repair costs so much you might as well buy a new one? Yesterday, national governments of the EU’s 28 member states, including the UK, have endorsed your right to repair these goods, by pledging to make manufacturers design more durable and repairable products. Read more
This post is by Bryn Kewley & Peter Clutton-Brock of E3G.
From an unassuming factory in Sunderland, the UK is leading the EU market in electric vehicles. It’s a market which is expected to grow quickly, with Norway already consulting on an outright ban on the sale of fossil fuel cars. Read more
Here in Brussels, the circular economy is dominating conversations in the EU district. To someone living in the UK, this may come as a surprise: industrial policy has fallen out of favour in Britain. But the Circular Economy Action Plan is the subject of two or three events every day here. Brussels is a city which loves to talk, but there is more to it than that. Replacing the linear make-use-dispose model with a new approach based on reuse, repair, remanufacture and recycling is being heralded as the new economic driver for Europe.
So here are five things you should know: Read more
The Prime Minister’s latest intervention in the EU referendum campaign illustrates how the environment is taking its place in the modern political canon. Speaking from the RSPB’s Rainham Marshes nature reserve, Cameron noted how our EU membership underpins crucial environmental protections, and talked about the importance of nurturing Britain’s countryside and wildlife. At the same time, his speech, if not his words, demonstrated that environmentalists are important too.
This post is by Viviane Gravey and Andy Jordan of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at UEA. They recently co-led an expert review of the environmental implications of Brexit funded by the UK in a Changing Europe Initiative.
Although the environment as has not yet become a central focus of debate between the two official campaigns, particular issues, like the state of the UK’s beaches and climate change, are getting an airing. Read more
This post is by Matthew Duhan, adviser at Global Counsel. It first appeared on Global Counsel’s blog.
On Monday 9 May 2016 at 23:10 something remarkable happened. For the first time since 1882 coal made no contribution to UK electricity generation. At the same moment, Germany, Europe’s leader in renewable energy and home to the Energiewende (‘energy transition’), was generating three quarters of its electricity from a mixture of hard coal and even more polluting lignite (see graph below). Read more
