Simon Lewis

Three of the 5 splits in the Burnham cabinet identified by the FT political correspondents are to do with climate policy Rosebank, the electric vehicle mandate, Heathrow airport expansion all pitch traditional industry models against the reality of climate breakdown www.ft.com/content/b04b...

In a little-noticed webpage update, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced a plan to decommission its online web archive at the end of the year, a move that would wipe tens of thousands of publicly available environmental resources from the web.

"Art can strengthen motivation to engage, while science provides evidence that can help channel that motivation toward effective action." Lovely piece.

Currently wondering what message the UK govt thought it was sending by dressing up the Minister for Net Zero in a literal Shell logo.

The 2026 UNEP Emissions Gap Report is out: The Point of Return. 🌍🌡️🔥 It's sobering but actionable. Decades of inadequate climate action have closed off opportunities to limit warming, but ambitious action today can still prevent much greater harm. A thread of some of the highlights 🧵

There is an increasingly disingenuous narrative peddled in Scotland about the impacts of granting new oil and gas licences on North Sea production levels and job security. Amid this, it’s important to look at evidence 🧵

The IPCC is pretty clear that if we want a safe climate there can be no new oil and gas. But every country thinks it has some special reason for why it should be the exception

The problem is not really Jackdaw, which is pretty small. The problem is the UK's plan to transition away from fossil fuels is still not ambitious and detailed enough. The problem is if Rosebank follows. The problem is if every country develops one last fossil fuel project we're all screwed.

US tariffs on Chinese solar panels: 260% US tariffs on Russian oil: 0%

12th International Carbon Dioxide Conference (ICDC12)Exeter, UK | 21-25 June 2027 Registration for ICDC12 is Now Open! The deadline for abstract submissions and min-workshop proposals is 15 December 2026. icdc12.org

This is a key test of Burnham’s resolve on climate crisis, because if you cut the BUS you give up on achieving the requisite pace of domestic heat decarbonisation to achieve net zero in 2050. The recent augurs are discouraging at this point but I’m wary of reading too much into faint signals

FACTCHECK: UK Conservatives double the ‘cost of net-zero’ after spreadsheet blunder The Tory "Right Way" booklet makes an erroneous claim about the cost of cutting emissions, possibly taken from a Jan26 thinktank report, and deffo the most idiotic error I've seen for a while 🧵

Post-doctoral fellow in global forest dynamics! TreeChange combines life history traits from field observations with demographic modelling to understand the future of forests and the carbon sink. Based at Lund in Sweden you will work with researchers across the world lu.varbi.com/what:job/job...

Accelerated tree mortality after a half-century of stability in an old-growth forest: Insights from a 72-year study www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We can’t fix the UKs problems without fixing housing costs, and we can’t fix housing costs without rent controls. Useful thread:

The CRAN Top 40 is a monthly attempt to sort through the new packages submitted to CRAN and find 40 quality packages that demonstrate the #RStats language and appeal to a wide audience of potential users. We hope you find something interesting and maybe even useful. rworks.dev/posts/august...

New analysis reckons the next clean power contract auction could knock £11bn off energy bills through to 2050, as the reduction in wholesale power costs will surpass the cost of any price guarantees for generators. www.businessgreen.com/news/4535986...

NEW: How did the summer heatwaves and wildfires change attitudes to climate and Net Zero, if at all? A short thread on analysis of tracker polling now summer is winding down. 🧵 (for @persuasionuk.bsky.social with @yougov.co.uk)

For years I've been told that aviation emissions are negligible, so don't worry your little head about them. But I've kept pointing out that there are - and will be - no good technical solutions, and they'll keep growing. Now we know just how big the problem is. www.carbonbrief.org/ccc-heathrow...

It would fill me with joy if a group of concerned citizens stopped every car coming out of Piddington, asked for their papers and denied then access to the UK until they get a Piddington passport and appropriate visa.

NSF has reduced the research budget for all atmospheric, ocean, and earth sciences by ~80%. 80%! A lot of us will not be conducting new research or training new students for the foreseeable future.

No amount of fudge can make airport expansion compatible with our climate commitments. It is disgraceful to see this government twist its own promises into knots simply to try to make bigger profits for the bosses of one private company in spite of the ever-growing costs of climate breakdown.

Pick one: - Expand Heathrow for the benefit of wealthy airport shareholders and ultra-frequent flyers - Stick to our climate targets to protect ourselves and our communities from harm The Climate Change Committee is clear we can't have both. www.ft.com/content/a8cd...

it still has pretty figures, i promise!

Thrilled to tell you that my paper “Protests as World Making Projects” with bestie Lidal Dror is now forthcoming and available open access on early online view at Nous 🧵 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

NEW for @carbonbrief.org As El Niño intensifies, the forest fires ripping through Indonesia are on track to reach levels not seen since 2015. The country's 2015 fire season has been linked to 100,000 premature deaths and produced emissions on a par with the EU's fossil-fuel emissions that year.

a great letter in the times today. perhaps worth sharing in these troubled times. #RNLI #heroes

📢 Call for Papers: 🌳Discover Forests @springernature.com Special Issue "Legacy Forest Data – Curation, Digitization, and Use for Long-Term Forest Research" Guest Editors: @hjboehmer.bsky.social & Sheila Ward | 🔗 link.springer.com/collections/... #AcademicSky #EcoEvo #ForestScience #OpenScience

Saying no to approving Jackdaw and Rosebank should be simple for Labour. There is no logical reason to say yes, and the right will move on fast to their next attack lines. A ‘no’ means the heat for Labour will be short-term; a yes and the heat will haunt them long-term as climate impacts escalate.

"In India, momentum in electric 3W (three wheeler) sales continued to build, with sales rising by 15% from 2024 to almost 800 000 vehicles. Electric 3Ws now capture almost 70% of all sales in the country, primarily displacing compressed natural gas models." Gas losing another market.

🧵CO₂ removal (CDR) is back in the news, but just because the UNEP report says we need CDR, it doesn't mean we'll have CDR. Many challenges will take decades of research and negotiation to solve. Here are some examples: Technological: We currently don't have any durable CDR method that scales.

The UK is loaning £400m to the TFFF, Brazil's pioneering fund to fight deforestation of rainforests. Make of this what you will, but this got go-ahead under Burnham less than two months after he became PM. Under Starmer, it was deemed bad optics to loan £400m for trees ahead of the autumn budget.

FT Lex: How climate volatility shakes up companies’ earnings too Major companies face over $1tn in annual lost revenue opportunities as a result of all types of extreme weather - MSCI "Small fluctuations in earnings could be just the beginning"... www.ft.com/content/e531...

1. A few years ago, people like me were widely attacked in the media for “declinism”. How could we fail to see that we were heading into a capitalist utopia, in which everything would keep getting better? This is a thread about what we could see that our critics could not. 🧵

Almost 80% of Britain’s rising fiscal costs will come from ageing by 2075, dwarfing the pressures from defence spending, net zero and lower migration. We should rebalance taxes away from work and towards wealth, says @benansell.bsky.social. Read more here: www.ippr.org/articles/tax...

Climate damage would obliterate any economic benefits of new North Sea fields, analysis shows - Economic harm of CO2 pollution from Rosebank and Jackdaw forecast to far outweigh any boost to UK #climatecrisis Story by me www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Extreme #heat killed at least 25,000 people in Western Europe alone this summer, according to a Bloomberg analysis. That's just this year. Over the past four years, extreme heat has killed more than 200,000 Europeans. #climatechange kills.

Hello Blue Skiers, I have a request, would be v grateful if you could share: I need to speak with doctors and hospital workers who were impacted by extreme heat conditions this summer in England. Thank you!

🧵 👇 on this great clip "UK is only 1% of emission so let's not bother with climate action". No, think of CO2 as litter or poo, and it does not make sense. #CarbonReckoning fare share legal case says we must take fair share in clearing up 👉 www.crowdjustice.com/case/carbon-... 🧵👇👇

Natalie Harp is one of the most powerful people alive. I'm not joking or exaggerating. Controlling what information the US president gets and publicly communicating on behalf of the president give someone significant influence over policy of the world's most powerful country, all the way up to war.

Buried at the heart of the Conservative party's pitch to scrap net-zero is this: A proposal to remove the grants that allow people to save money when buying an electric car or a heat pump. While providing more support for the expansion of data centres.

Ulez has delivered remarkable public health gains in a short period. Sadiq deserves more credit than he’s had for defying Labour pressure to U-turn after Uxbridge. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

"Legitimate concerns", is it