#SmogDay: remembering air pollution’s victims & clearing the air
Action: please call on MPs to sign Caroline Lucas' #SmogDay early day motion for urgent action to clean the air in our towns and cities. Smog Day is a day to remember all the people who have died prematurely, and avoidably, because of air pollution, and to advance...
Good and bad productivity
So much to worry about. And now the worry that preoccupies leader writers and politicians to the point of sleeplessness. UK productivity. Its bad. In 2016, Britain has a five-point productivity gap with Spain, a 30-point gap with Ireland, a 34-point gap with Belgium...
Why people long for stories
“It takes a civilized man,” said George Bernard Shaw, “to be deeply moved by statistics.” The whole edifice of Fabian statistics, outcomes, learnings, KPIs and so on were built on those foundations. Shaw was not wrong. You do need an imagination to imagine the picture...
Milking it
Systemic corporate failures are leaving our glass of milk half empty... There's a milk and butter shortage threatened, who would have thought it? And it's accompanied by the usual, willfully ignorant media jokes about the French croissant becoming a rarity. Morrisons...
New: modern folk tales from top scientists, economists, ecologists & activists
Knock Twice: is a new collection of 25 modern folk tales for troubling times by a group of leading scientists, economists, environmentalists and policy experts and activists. Realising the limits of facts and policy alone to change the world, an innovative group of...
Can any country opt-out of Google?
Nations may opt-out of the EU, and regions out of nations, but is corporate power inescapable? Lindsay Mackie reports on a vital, missing debate Is corporate power a danger to democracies? This was the key, under-considered question that the New Weather Institute...
Economic growth: the cost of money vs the price paid by planetary life support
The first media question raised in response to new economic growth figures is typically about resulting interest rates, but our real interests should lie in considering the impact on our planetary life support systems. The BBC spoke to the New Weather Institute about...
Why climate change means more earthquakes and volcanoes
In a world distracted by political tremors Bill McGuire warns we are waking real, angry giants Too many people think that climate change is all about the atmosphere - if they think about it at all – where the carbon pollution arising from human excesses is...
The absent and violent corporation
Earlier this year my colleague David Boyle and I published a New Weather pamphlet called The Absent Corporation in which we explained our (then) daring theory that the modern giant global corporation now treats its customers with contempt and neglect as a matter of...
The great debate between talking and doing
I helped launch my new pamphlet The_Grammar_of_Change, commissioned from New Weather by the Local Trust, the agency which is distributing £1m each over the years to 150 of the most impoverished estates. One of the issues that came up at the launch was the question of...