debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
I have let the Davos chatter wash over me with scarcely a thought. But this is important. Nicolas Stern, whose 2006 climate change report for the British government was instrumental in convincing sceptical politicians of the evidence for and risks of climate change, has said he was mistaken. Reporting an interview given in the Swiss [...]
In the shadow of the euro crisis and America’s fiscal cliff, it is easy to ignore the global economy’s long-term problems. But, while we focus on immediate concerns, they continue to fester, and we overlook them at our peril. The most serious is global warming. While the global economy’s weak performance has led to a [...]
To help stop the planet warming to a disastrous extent Europe must increase the price of energy paid by energy consumers. A huge redirection of private and public investment is needed. And unless we are extremely successful in increasing the energy efficiency of our economy, we will almost certainly also need schemes to organise a [...]
Watch Andrew Simms, Fellow at the New Economics Foundation (NEF) in London, discuss climate change and the flaws of the GDP-based growth model. This talk was recorded at the conference ‘From (un)economic growth to future well-being’ organised by the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) and the European Public Service Union (EPSU) in Brussels on 15th [...]
What kind of directions and roles do you see transnational governance as playing in relation to some key issues: climate change and regional conflicts and nuclear non-proliferation? David Held: I think that multilateral organisations in the conventional form of international governmental organisations suffer from two deficits which pervade them; one is they don’t meet the [...]
The global financial crisis offers a big opportunity for progressive politicians to reenergise the green agenda. Dieter Helm assesses why we have failed to tackle the issue of global warming in the past and considers whether ‘Green Growth’ is likely to be a part of global economic recovery No significant progress has been made in [...]
Voters in Greece, France and the United Kingdom have sent a clear signal in the past month that they want governments to give priority to jobs and opportunities as well as reducing deficits and debt. Lord Nicholas Stern argues that unleashing the low-carbon economy could achieve these goals. Framed by credible and stable policies, the European Union [...]
The issue of climate change is unlikely to play much of a role in the US Presidential election campaign, which will begin in June with the nomination of a Republican candidate to face Barack Obama. It may however, have already decided the outcome, by ensuring that any possible Republican nominee is unelectable. The Republican position [...]
It is remarkable how willingly governments have surrendered national sovereignty to S&P and the bond markets while ceding sovereignty on carbon emissions governance to a UN body is anathema. The power of finance to blackmail governments seems much stronger than the power of nature – at least so far. What will act as the sword [...]
Holding the UN climate change conference in Durban is appropriate: climate change matters more to Africa than anywhere else. The African climate is set to become hotter and more volatile, exposing the region’s poor to heightened risk due to heavy dependence upon rain-fed agriculture. This alone would incline Africa to be at the forefront of [...]
The heart of the sustainability debate is not philosophical but scientific. There is a massive body of evidence about climate change, pollution, resource depletion and other negative effects that stem directly and indirectly from human activity – more specifically, from much of conventional economic activity. (See, for example, New Scientist’s basic introduction). It is impossible [...]
Environmentalism is the tree that grew in the shade. When the modern environmental movement first flowered in the early 1970s, its intellectual genesis was soon overshadowed by a profound convulsion in the political economies of western democracies. The breakdown of the Keynesian consensus ushered in a much more free-market variant of capitalism – ironically, at [...]
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