Monthly Archives: December 2016

Separation Anxiety: challenges for the environment from Brexit

“We need to take environmental discussions out of the technocratic closet and make them popular” was Baroness Kate Parminter’s take home message from this year’s Burntwood Lecture, held by the Institution of Environmental Sciences. In her lecture, Baroness Parminter, the Liberal Democrat spokesperson in the House of Lords for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, addressed the ‘separation anxiety’ that

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Looking Ahead to 2017: The Emissions Reduction Plan

Alex Chisholm, the Permanent Secretary at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (DBEIS), indicated earlier this year that the UK Government will publish its ‘Emissions Reduction Plan’ by the end of February 2017. The Emissions Reduction Plan will set out how the Government intends to meet post-2020 greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets, including the Fifth Carbon Budget, which

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Strategic Vision Needed as the UK energy system experiences a ‘Kodak Moment’

The energy system is inherently geographical; the current system is dominated by centralised points of large-scale transformation, connected spatially to sites of consumption through infrastructure that transports and transmits electricity and natural gas via the National Grid and the national transmission network. Yet this system is based on fossil fuels. To meet the legally binding targets within the UK’s 2008 Climate Change

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