Environmentalists come in all varieties, from those in suits working for corporations to those dedicated to attacking those corporations. They all tend to get tarred as doomsters but there are plenty of optimists among them.

‘Are’ or ‘were’? The cause of planetary salvation has not had it easy since the credit crunch began. And here in the UK, October has proved to be the cruellest month… so far.

The plan to consult on an 80mph speed limit (ENDS Report 441, p 34) is the clearest case to date of the coalition government saying that cutting carbon is of secondary, or tertiary, importance. Never before has its Committee on Climate Change been told quite so clearly that on some things its views matter very little. (more…)

Yesterday the Independent Climate Change Email inquiry published its findings, the most important being that climate science is (still) not in doubt. The so-called Climategate review led by former civil servant Sir Muir Russell was set up to investigate allegations against climate scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. These emerged following the unauthorised release of about 1,000 CRU emails last November.

As ENDS said at the time, the whole affair has been a storm in a teacup. Yesterday was just another day, another Climategate inquiry. (more…)

America is lashing out in all directions in the aftermath of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. BP deserves many of the brickbats. The pasting that the company is getting in the US is a wake-up call to all operators of hazardous processes. The deeper lesson is that weaning ourselves off fossil fuels is a much larger challenge than we thought.

An early lesson from Deepwater Horizon is that major environmental disasters have lost none of their power to shock. Indeed the stakes look higher than ever.

The size of the spill is still well within global records. The death toll, sad though it is, is still small compared with too many other industrial accidents. Even the impact on nature, though the worst is yet to come, remains limited. Yet the US public and media has gone metaphorically ballistic. (more…)