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Germany, which is desperately short of energy options, has finally decided (after much debate / dithering) that it will shut down its last nuclear power stations by April 2023.  This is an act born of green ethical principle it seems. At...

With COP27 starting, it will be instructive to see what official discourse and communiques have to say about the chance of restricting the post-industrial global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Global temperature rise is now in the 1.0 to...

Well, yes, I know she has not gone away, and was in London last week to promote her new book, and herself, of course – nothing wrong in that. But this wasn't the old Greta; the awkward grump we've come...

I see that there is to be a party at the Palace on Friday when the King hosts a pre-COP27 meeting to … To do what exactly? It can’t be to celebrate his not going to the COP (I note...

When I went to university as an undergraduate to study chemistry (back in 1965) one of the first tasks we were set in physical chemistry was to estimate how many molecules from Caesar's last breath we were now breathing in....

Nick Gibb is back at the DfE, but not (it seems) in his old role as minister of state for school standards.  Given that it was never clear why he was sacked in the first place, there might be some...

I watched the recent England v. Samoa rugby league world cup match which was rather one-sided in the end, I thought.  I only switched on with a couple of minutes of the introduction to go, but wasn't late enough to...

The AGC (or A-GC if you're a stickler for syntactical niceties) was our shape-shifting government's enemy of choice: the "anti-growth coalition"; this is a catch-all phrase for all those "holding Britain back". It reminds me of (as a lot of...

When you are trying to encourage one thing and discourage another – say a technologically-driven shift from brown to green(er) widgets – is it better to subsidise the green type or tax the brown? This is a question that I'd...

A conversation at the engaging Teach the Future Adult Advisory Board the other day brought to mind research on schools sending youngsters home in the hope of positively influencing parental environmental actions.  What follows is from memory which might be...