In a recent poll only nine percent of respondents said they wanted to return to the world as it was pre-Covid19. We need to be preparing that new world now. So let us imagine it, this new world. The kindness of neighbours we can leave on one side for the moment - it’s...
Rapid Transition
Rapid Transition is all about how we get from here to future sustainability without leaving anyone behind. Our Rapid Transition Alliance is all about “evidence-based hope”. Stories of the kind of behaviour change necessary to live within planetary ecological boundaries and to limit global warming to below 1.5 degrees.
National Gardening Leave: an opportunity to reinvent working lives and urban spaces
How often are ideas that once seemed radical and to some, even preposterous, made tame by the turn of events? That is the case now with the suggestion that Britain should experiment with National Gardening Leave, an idea suggested in a 2012 pamphlet I wrote with my...
Why and how rationing works – lessons from rapid civic mobilisation
Nothing like the current upheavals around the world in the wake of the novel coronavirus, COVID19, have been experienced in peacetime. But societies have mobilised like this during conflict and mass conflagrations. Are there lessons to be learned, and could it lead to...
Time for a genuinely civil, civil contingencies response
Lindsay Mackie and Andrew Simms explore how crises reveal fundamental flaws in underlying political and economic models and call for a new approach It looks like it’s going to be a national emergency, or, in Whitehall terms, a very grave civil contingency. Novel...
Five fails in UK climate emergency action
As the UK is revealed to be the biggest net importer of carbon dioxide emissions per person in the G7 group of wealthy nations, heterodox economist Katie Kedward spells out five reasons to question the UK government’s progress on tackling the...
Climate Breakdown? We need to talk about the Treasury
Extinction Rebellion held a People's Assembly in Parliament to identify new priorities for each government department, this is an adapted from Andrew Simms' short speech on the challenge to the Treasury When he led the Treasury as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon...
The Green New Deal – now make it happen…
https://youtu.be/PvEvfhdSaJo We all know there is a climate emergency, but what we can do about it? Any action capable of working at the speed and scale needed looks like a Green New Deal. Now there's a proposal before Parliament to deliver one. Here's Caroline...
Can we transform the world in 12 years? New short film for the BBC
Here's some evidence-based hope in a warming world... Working in collaboration with Tamarack Media, and the Rapid Transition Alliance, we've made this short film for the BBC. Now that climate change is undeniable, some switch to saying that the action necessary to...
Academics attack fracking & call on transformation for climate
Key decisions are being taken now about whether or not the UK locks-in continuing dependence on fossil fuels. The fracas over fracking led some scientists with relationships to the oil and gas industry in a letter to The Times newspaper to support claims for a...
Economic prospects for 2019: New Weather and the FT survey
Each year the Financial Times newspaper investigates the UK’s upcoming economic prospects with a survey of analysts. New Weather took part. Last year, says the paper, the survey’s predictions proved highly accurate. For most the uncertainty of Brexit now clouds many...