The Baku metro announces its arrival at each station with a blast of triumphant music. It sounds as if it has achieved something heroic. For a minute, there is a rush of people moving back and forth. Then the doors close, and the train goes on its way, just as […]
Latest blog posts
COP28: signal, noise, and structure
Another one down. 28 of them. 100,000 people shivering in the air conditioning while the world bakes outside. Emissions still going up. What’s new? The signal There is a trade-off in diplomacy between breadth and depth. You can’t expect a negotiation among 198 parties to agree anything deep and substantial, […]
It’s not about your footprint, it’s about your point of leverage
I hadn’t known before that the idea of a carbon footprint was deliberately promoted by an oil company. But now that I know – thanks to an informative article from Mark Kaufman – I’m not really surprised. Why would an oil company push us to think about our carbon footprints? For the […]
Super-leverage points
The biggest risk of dangerous climate change comes from the way all the tipping points in the Earth system are linked. Ice sheets, ocean currents, permafrost, and the Amazon Forest are all connected. Crossing one tipping point increases the chances of crossing others, increasing the pace and scale of change until […]
Three less visible battles to win
We all know that stopping climate change involves replacing a lot of physical infrastructure: power plants, pipelines, boilers and blast furnaces. But what if replacing some invisible infrastructure – that of ideas and institutions – is equally important? After all, as Keynes said, sooner or later it is ideas, not vested interests, […]
Moore of the Wright stuff: COP27, cooperation, and calling peak fossils
The Sinai is falling away beneath me, and the sound of overcrowded conference halls is clearing from my head. I’m flying out of COP27 and, I suspect like many others, pondering our position. A presentation by Cameron Hepburn at the China pavilion earlier this week reminded me of a strange […]
The most efficient way to decarbonise may not be what many think
The most outstanding successes of decarbonisation policy in China, India, Brazil and Europe have come from targeted investment policies, including subsidies, cheap finance, and public procurement. If we stop thinking of these policies and public intervention as ‘second best’, we can replicate their successes and make faster progress towards climate […]
What do the world’s fastest transitions to low carbon power and transport have in common?
Norway is making the world’s fastest transition to zero emissions road transport. Over half of all cars sold in the country are electric vehicles (EVs), about ten times the share that EVs have achieved in most major markets, and twenty times as high as than the global average. The UK is making […]
How a critical mass of countries could double the pace of the global transition to zero emission vehicles, and how you can help
Simon Sharpe, Deputy Director, UK COP26 Unit, and Drew Kodjak, Executive Director, International Council on Clean Transportation The transition from petrol and diesel cars to zero emission vehicles is accelerating towards a tipping point. Governments of some of the world’s largest and most influential car markets just agreed to work […]
Expecting the exponential: seeing the pattern in the energy transition could save investors half a trillion dollars
Forecasters of the energy transition keep making the same mistake: radically underestimating the pace of change. Events of the last week show that the transition will continue to accelerate. To get ahead of the game, we need to think in curves instead of straight lines. Investors need to learn quickly, or else they […]