When I first began to use computers in the 1980s, my Techie pals in the opensource community were dismissive of Microsoft’s ‘clunky’ and vulnerable software and advised me against using its products. But I disagreed. In the eyes of geeks, the software may have been badly coded but it was accessible for me, a non-geeky …
There are two global forces positively thriving – despite today’s crises. They are the lethal coronavirus and the world’s billionaires – engaged in a form of ‘co-production’. Why are they thriving? And why do their interests align so happily? The ‘interests’ of a lethal virus are clear. The microbe’s supreme ambition is to spread as …
This review of books to inspire a green transformation appeared in The Guardian on 18 July, 2020. Everyday life has been upended by the pandemic, but the Arctic heatwave is a reminder that the climate crisis still poses an urgent threat to humanity. We will need resolve, ambition and optimism as we emerge from lockdown, …
Green Shoots: the best books to inspire hope for the planet Read More »
Read about my speaking tour of Australia below – from the SEARCH Foundation: The SEARCH Foundation is currently touring eminent British economist and author Ann Pettifor around Australia and she is visiting our shores with a warning; the GFC inducing credit crunch is not over and Australia’s banking sector is vulnerable. Ms Pettifor is visiting …
My tour of Australia – with the SEARCH Foundation Read More »
Last month I gave a ‘Green Talk‘ in Bristol, organised by Climate Works. It was wonderful to be, first of all at such a professionally and well organised event (congrats to Mark Letcher and his team). It was also fantastic to be amongst such an interesting array of speakers including John Gapper ‘the secret gardener’ …
Financing the Green Transition – why we can afford it Read More »
It’s a gorgeous day here in Oxford…had a little wander yesterday during the lunch-break, and came across clusters of worried-looking students wearing a strange garment which flapped – like a short gown – sporting white, pink and red carnations. So I asked them why? It turns out that on the first day of exam writing, …
More from the World Forum on Enteprise and the Envirionment. Professor Kathy Willis says (and I paraphrase crudely) that increased carbon emissions may not necessarily lead to desertification as widely predicted, but may instead lead to more ‘woody cover’ i.e. forests in e.g. the world’s tropical areas… Her evidence is quite convincing, drawing on previous …
Listening to Dr Simon Stuartof IUCN – Species Survival Commission… has great slides, which hopefully will be on the website. Tracking birds as biodiversity indicator, measuring extinction..Notes significant and largely irreversible extinction trends..Amphibians, rapid decline..reef-forming corals, the most threatened… Sturgeons, Cycads, Sharks and rays….mangroves… State of biodiversity going down, pressure on biodiversity going up, our …
I am privileged to be a speaker at the World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment, hosted by Sir David King of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Oxford. Sir David today has a column in the Guardian in which he calls on Prime Minister David Cameron to exercise leadership on the global …
