When Ahmed Sheikh Yamani, Saudi oil minister during the oil shocks of the 1970s and 80s, famously said that “the Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the oil age will end long before the world runs out of oil”, he was not thinking of renewable energy and electric vehicles, he was […]
It’s July. It seems hard to believe we are just half-way through this extraordinary, difficult year. I think my March piece for BloombergNEF (Covid-19 – The Low-Carbon Crisis), has been aging fairly well. We are indeed on track for a fall in energy-related CO2 emissions of more than 5% – with the International Energy Agency estimating […]
We are living through one of the most extraordinary years in recent history, a year none of us will ever forget. Much has been written about the parallels with 1918, the year of the Spanish Flu, but I want to start by taking you back even further, to 1868, a year in which a number […]
The shock of Covid-19 lockdowns hit the world’s urban transportation systems like a heart attack. As discussions now turn to how we reopen the economy, we should not expect a quick recovery. Indeed, there is every chance that mass transit is looking at the equivalent of debilitating chronic heart disease, with lower demand, but even lower capacity. […]
At the end of last year, in a comment piece for BloombergNEF entitled Peak Emissions Are Closer Than You Think, I predicted that energy-related CO2 emissions would peak and then drop by around 5% within the next decade. […]
So here we are, standing on the threshold of a new decade. It will be, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, a decade of consequences. Play it right, and we have a chance of avoiding the worst impacts of climate change. Waste it, and we are in uncharted territory. […]
Ten years ago, almost to the day, the climate world was stunned by the failure of the COP15 climate conference in Copenhagen. This month, COP25 in Madrid – moved there because of rioting in Chile – also ended in failure. […]
This week, in preparation for an appearance on BBC Radio 4’s flagship environment programme, Costing the Earth, I forced myself to read the Labour Manifesto promises on energy and transport. OMG! It’s even worse than I thought. […]
As I fly in to New York for Climate Week (I know, flight-shame, more on that later), I have been reading about the bankruptcy of Purdue Pharma. Over the past 20 years the company has been hit with over 2,600 lawsuits because of the central role its Oxycontin painkiller played in the opioid crisis sweeping […]
In November 2017, browsing my Twitter timeline in the cab on the way to an industry dinner, I came across a Tweet that hit me like a punch in the guts: “Three of our oxygen-dependent babies died last night when the power went off. Not good enough in 2017. Low-cost tech e.g. affordable solar power […]
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