Energy transitions – May 2

•Small-town mayors: the cutting edge of climate action •How are communities raising serious money for green energy projects? •Is 70 Percent Renewable Power Possible? Portugal Just Did It For 3 Months •Germany’s Energy Transition Experiment •London’s cooking waste to fuel power station •Lessons From Thailand: Mobilizing Investment In Energy Efficiency

Hypocrites in the air: should climate change academics lead by example?

From the World Bank and PricewaterhouseCoopers through to Stern and the International Energy Agency, analyses increasingly demonstrate how, without urgent and radical reductions in emissions, global temperatures are set to rise by 4°C or higher – with, as the IEA emphasise, “devastating” repercussions for the planet. But whose responsibility is it to initiate such radical mitigation?

On Building a Better (and More Resilient) World: Complexity, Community, and the Precautionary Principle

From the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami to Superstorm Sandy, the last decade has seen an incredible array of natural disasters…The proliferation of disasters is raising awareness about our collective need to minimize vulnerability and to bounce back afterwards – our need for greater resilience.  

“I’m sorry … what?”: a visit to the Met Office Hadley Centre

The other day a friend and I took our young sons on a tour of the Met Office’s centre near Exeter. The Met Office is home to the Hadley Centre, one of the foremost centres where climate modelling and research into climate change takes place. It was to turn out to be an event I left both angry and puzzled, and with some reflections I’d like to share here. The tour itself is of little consequence to this piece, other than to say that it managed to turn what could have been really interesting hour’s tour into a fairly tedious 3 hours, and certainly not a tour designed to sustain children’s interest. The low point for me, however, was when we actually reached the Hadley Centre. So, picture the scene …