November 2015

  • On the rocky road to Dawlish

    It's always good to spend endless time on Last Great Western (which I must now refer to as GWR, it seems; what a travesty!) and pootle slowly down to Plymouth (via Dawlish) to see a real sustainable university in action....

  • Only +2.7 degrees? No need to worry

    Recently, the late night news programmes on both main TV channels had features about COP21.  These both drew heavily on what Christiana Figueres, the UN climate chief, has been saying. Noting that 155 countries have already put forward detailed plans covering 88% of global CO2...

  • Drill Or Drop

    Drill or Drop is a website publishing "independent, evidence-based" journalism about the onshore oil and gas business in the UK and the campaign against it.  It is named after the “drill or drop” clause in a petroleum exploration and development licence that requires...

  • The Swedes add an 18th SDG

    As if 17 global goals were not enough, along comes an 18th, although it is not from the UN.  Rather, it's from a Swedish band, The Knife, which, unsurprisingly, I had not heard of.  You can listen to them here; ABBA they...

  • My heroes of the week

    Time for some relief from all the angst that usually fills these columns.  Here are the heroes I've come across this week (some rather belatedly): beacons of sense and sanity to us all ... Bertie Pollock, who set fire to his father's...

  • Does Australia really want COP21 to fail?

    Why Australia wants Paris to fail - a coal exporting country's perspective on plans to cut global emissions, is the title of next week's I-SEE seminar in Bath by Dr Richard Denniss, the chief economist of the Australia Institute.  This is...

  • Questions for FEE

    FEE – the Foundation for Environmental Education – is the international group that manages (amongst other things) the Eco-schools franchise, and which therefore, one way or another, determines and/or limits what national Eco-schools teams can do and achieve.  This is what FEE says:...

  • Another challenging Mark Lynas blog

    The blog, Peak Environmental Impact, begins, ... "You won’t hear about it from green campaigners, but many of the key drivers of environmental destruction are slowing down.  The rate of population growth is nearly half today what it was in 1970....

  • State of the sector report

    As catchy titles go, you have to say that this is down there with "M4 closed by accident" which my local newspapers seem to feature every week. The report in question, is on sustainability in UK tertiary education, and it...