This post is by Anne Velenturf, Phil Purnell and Juliet Jopson, the co-ordination team of the Resource Recovery from Waste programme at the University of Leeds.
As consumers stock up on Christmas presents, the annual homage to consumerism sees many products end up in the bin as soon as festive cheer has faded. Read more
The collapse of government talks with Hitachi this week takes almost 3GW of future nuclear capacity off the table. While opinion on nuclear is polarised, the UK had been relying on it to meet long term climate targets. With this week’s announcement, 9GW of proposed nuclear capacity has now been suspended. This leaves an increasing low carbon energy gap which will have to be filled by 2030 to meet legal carbon targets. Read more
Green Alliance launched the new Tech Task Force earlier this month at an evening reception addressed by Claire Perry MP and the members of the Task Force: HVM Catapult, Innovate UK, Gambica, Schneider Electric and Ramboll. With it, we are setting out to make sure digital technologies help to close the north-south divide and make the UK a greener and more prosperous place for everyone. That optimistic vision runs counter to recent headlines suggesting robots and artificial intelligence software will make us all obsolete. Read more
This post is by Jonathan Bosch, research postgraduate at the Grantham Institute, Imperial College London.
The internal electricity market (IEM) is one of the major achievements of the European single market, allowing electricity to be traded and transmitted seamlessly across national borders. The UK has played a crucial role in the IEM’s development, working with EU energy regulatory agencies to help achieve ‘market coupling’, whereby power station operation and interconnection capacity are allocated simultaneously to achieve more efficient outcomes. The IEM relies on the physical interconnection infrastructure across the continent, and current plans see an expansion of interconnection between the UK and the European mainland in the coming years.
For farmers, change is a way of life. Weather is unpredictable. Consumer appetites change. Prices go up and down. Managing uncertainty and volatility goes with the job.
But the ability of farmers to keep bouncing back will soon be tested to its limits, and possibly beyond. Brexit will bring change of a scale and at a speed that will dwarf anything seen by the current generation of farmers. This could include changes to the availability and cost of labour, the size and terms of subsidy payments, the potential imposition of new import and export tariffs and, should certain trade deals be struck, increased competition from low cost food imports. Not all farmers will cope. Many are likely to fail. Read more
This post is by Marcus Gilleard, senior external affairs adviser, National Trust. It is a version of an article first published on National Trust’s NT Places blog.
Nearly a year ago, the National Trust’s Director-General Helen Ghosh set out the basic principles on which we believed a post-Brexit system of support for UK farming should be developed. Since then, we’ve fleshed out our thinking and joined forces with other charities, as part of Greener UK, to help the UK and devolved governments develop their proposals. A core focus of our work remains the concept that public money should pay for the delivery of public goods. Read more
This year the spring budget comes at an odd time for all things low carbon in the UK. In February, the government published its industrial strategy, setting out its clean growth aims as part of Theresa May’s flagship domestic economic policy. By the beginning of the summer, the government will produce a ‘clean growth’ plan, outlining how the UK will meet its fourth and fifth carbon budgets (covering 2023-32).
Theresa May recently launched the centrepiece of her domestic agenda: the UK’s industrial strategy. After six months of commentary on the parallels between the phenomena that led to the Brexit vote and US election result, it is useful to reflect on the differences that are starting to emerge. A quick read of the green paper appears to show that May is charting a very different course on industrial strategy from the one now being advocated on the other side of the Atlantic. Significant differences are the approach to resource productivity and the attitude to growing low carbon markets. Read more
This post is by Shaun Spiers, chief executive of CPRE. It first appeared on CPRE’s blog.
There will be much to welcome in this month’s housing white paper. We expect a big emphasis on brownfield development and more support to enable local authority planning departments to do their job. Best of all, it looks set to address the main cause of the housing shortage: not planning or a lack of land, but the system’s over dependence on a dozen big companies to deliver the new homes the country needs. Read more
Reading the news, it’s hard to know what to make of the UK’s low carbon progress. On Christmas Day we were running on 40 per cent renewable power, and earlier last year we switched all our coal fired power stations off for the first time in 130 years. Read more
