We generally don’t bother commenting on misleading reporting of environmental issues. Journalists (and I speak as someone who used to be one) have been putting a sensationalist spin on stories (and non-stories) since newspapers began. Moreover, anecdotal evidence from discussion groups we’ve run suggests that much of the sceptical coverage on environmental issues has very [...]
Obsessive carbon-counting climbs to an adrenaline-soaked peak on the University of Oxford’s trillionth tonne counter. With admirably few words, the university’s Department of Physics has used a short series of panic-inducing counters to indicate the imminent collapse of the world as we know it. Of course, demonstrating that the changes needed to avoid catastrophe can be positive, [...]
One of the central issues in reducing our collective carbon footprint is whether, and how, we can achieve a shift away from fossil fuels to other, lower carbon alternatives. Yet the majority of us know very little about different energy generating technologies (renewable or not), their costs, generating potential, and their exact implications for carbon [...]
On Friday I went to the launch of the Sustainable Consumption Institute’s report, ‘Consumers, business and climate change’. The conference had an impressive line up of speakers, including the CEOs of Tesco, Coca Cola, Unilever, SC Johnson and Reckitt Benckiser, as well as the chief executive of WWF, Robert Putnam (the academic who brought the [...]
Carbon quilt: a global cover up…
One of the challenges behaviour change practitioners have to grapple with is how to make climate change ‘real’ to people. How do you show the public what damage they are causing as a result of their lifestyles in a way that is meaningful and doesn’t give the impression that they are too small a part [...]