In June 2014, after a 20-year staring competition with China and other developing countries, the USA blinked, announcing new domestic rules to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without requiring developing countries to do the same. Frustrated by US Congress’s stalemate on climate action, President Barack Obama took measures to advance a major step in his Climate […]
Most businesses now get climate change. And if they say they don’t they’re fooling themselves; either because it doesn’t quite square with their business model to acknowledge that they might have to change or adapt, or because they don’t want their business to fail when they are in charge. In the latest attempts to get […]
I invite you to imagine a dragon who lives at the top of the world, sleeping. He has been there for as long as people can remember, benignly omnipresent, thanks to a ritual that the people undergo in order to keep them safe, to keep the dragon under the spell cast at the dawning of […]
The end of September was an important time for those that follow climate change negotiations. A precursor to the 2015 Climate Change Conference in Paris, where governments have pledged to reach a universal climate change agreement, governments and businesses got together in New York to discuss how they can and should tackle climate change. Whether […]
This September, Temple Place in London hosted the starting line of the biggest march against climate change that this country has seen. Taking place two days ahead of the UN Climate Summit in New York, the People’s Climate March united a staggering 310,000 people across the globe in an attempt to urge the world’s most […]
This is an important judgment on governmental liability for a rather shabby retrospective change of the rules about subsidies for photovoltaic schemes. The Court of Appeal had decided in 2012 that the changes were unlawful: see judgment and my post. The question in Breyer was whether businesses could obtain damages under A1P1 arising out of […]
Long awaited and controversial plans for ‘biodiversity offsets’ are the subject of a consultation published as part of the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (Defra) response to a March report by the independent, business-led Ecosystems Market Task Force, which backed proposals for biodiversity offsetting The idea of biodiversity offsetting is that developers may […]
The energy regulator, Ofgem, has predicted that the UK risks running out of energy generating capacity in the winter of 2015-16. The National Policy Statement for Nuclear Power Generation, published in July 2011, identified eight sites as potentially suitable for new nuclear power stations and noted that there was an urgent need for these to […]
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), while a milestone for climate change governance, represents both advancement and compromise. Through its very existence, states have acknowledged that human activities, such as fossil-fuel based energy production and use, dangerously increase greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change. Over time, the global climate change […]
The European Commission has suggested suspending the enforcement processes attaching to aviation with the European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) for the period of a year. The proposal is part of a strategy to persuade non-EU states to formulate some alternative programme which can apply globally to combat emissions of greenhouse gases from the aviation sector. […]
