Amber Rudd, the UK's minister for the Department of Energy and Climate Change, gives a press conference shortly after the agreement of the Paris climate deal. Carbon Brief's Leo Hickman asks a question at 5'02". Image credit UNFCCC/Flickr.

COP21: Amber Rudd gives a press conference following the adoption of the agreement

Nick Hurd, the UK's Minister of State for Climate Change and Industry, answers questions from journalists at the UN climate change conference in Marrakech (COP22), following the UK's ratification of the Paris climate deal. 

Image credit: Comité des Régions via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

UK climate minister Nick Hurd press conference at COP22 UN climate change conference, Marrakech

Carbon brief interviews Barry Gardiner, Labour's shadow minister for international climate change.

The Carbon Brief Interview: Labour's Barry Gardiner

Carbon Brief interviews Prof Michael Gerrard of Columbia Law School, who teaches courses on environmental law, climate change law and energy regulation.

How might climate litigation be used in the coming years?

Why do Republicans have such an extreme reaction to climate science and the resulting policies?

Lord Lawson interviewed on the BBC Radio 4's Today Programme, 10/08/2017. Read more: https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-lord-lawson-inaccurate-claims-about-climate-change-bbc-radio-four

Lord Lawson discusses Al Gore's new film An Inconvenient Sequel on BBC Radio 4

BBC Radio 4's Today programme corrects its earlier inaccurate interview with climate sceptic Lord Lawson. Presenter John Humphrys interviews the BBC's environment analyst Roger Harrabin and the Met Office's Prof Peter Stott - 11 August 2017

BBC Radio 4 Today: Roger Harrabin and Prof Peter Stott

"Powering Past Coal Alliance" UK/Canada press conference at COP23 in Bonn. Featuring Catherine McKenna, Canada's climate minister, and Claire Perry, UK's climate minister. Recorded on 16 November 2017.

"Powering Past Coal Alliance" UK/Canada press conference at COP23 in Bonn

Claire Perry MP, the UK's minister for clean growth and energy, speaking at the Royal Meteorological Society meeting on "Minimising Climate Risks" at Imperial College London on 17 January 2018 https://www.rmets.org/events/minimising-climate-risks
Image: Russell Moore / Alamy Stock Photo

Claire Perry MP, speaking at the Royal Meteorological Society, London on 17 January 2018

Dr Charlie Wilson on 'How to limit warming to 1.5°C without CCS'.

Shared with permission from The Energy Transition Show, with Chris Nelder, via XE Network - https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-73-climate-science-part-10-how-to-limit-warming-to-1-5-degrees-c-without-ccs/

Transcript: 

"So much of the scenario and modelling analysis of how to meet the 1.5˚C target has been, well we thought as the author team, strongly biased towards supply side measures. In other words, kind of decarbonising the energy supply upstream, getting fossil fuels out of the energy resource mix that we put into the global energy system, and that this analysis, as well as focusing very strongly on the supply side, also makes certain sort of basic assumptions about energy demand which is basically that if you're growing the economy, which almost all the scenarios do, and you're growing the population, which almost all the scenarios do, then you're going to grow energy demand which is what almost all the scenarios do. And of course there's historical evidence to show this relationship between demand and the economy in population. But we felt that much of the analysis was, if you like, removing it from the table of what we could look at in terms of deep decarbonisation. And I should say as well this kind of supply side bias is a fairly well-known issues with modelling because most of the modelling tools that are used in this kind of analysis tend to have a very, very detailed representation of the energy supply. Lots and lots of technological detail, but they don't really capture energy demand in anything like the equivalent resolution So we wanted to show in our work that by emphasizing energy demand, energy users, energy services you can generate really useful and new insights on climate change mitigation and the 1.5˚C target."

"If you're talking about for 1.5˚C, even for 2˚C, you're talking about an absolutely fundamental systemic transition in the way we produce, deliver, convert and use energy. So focusing the scenario and modelling analysis on just the one bit of it, the upstream bit, you know which energy resources we use and how we convert them into electricity or whatever, just focusing on that, is only a part of the picture. If you focus on that as a set of technical solutions you say, OK we can keep using all these fossil fuels, we just have this CCS infrastructure that we build on top. You're kind of leaving the rest of the what we call the socio-technical system, this sort of entwined set of things to do with people and things to do with hardware. You're leaving the whole rest of that as is and we don't think that's consistent with the level of transformation needed for 1.5˚C."

Dr Charlie Wilson on 'How to limit warming to 1.5°C without CCS'

Dr Simon Evans of Carbon Brief is interviewed by John Humphrys on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme about his new analysis showing that UK electricity generation in 2018 fell to its lowest level since 1994.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-electricity-generation-2018-falls-to-lowest-since-1994

Carbon Brief's Dr Simon Evans on BBC Radio4 Today prog - 3 Jan 2019

Carbon Brief reports on the latest developments and media coverage of climate science and energy policy, with a particular focus on the UK. We produce news coverage, analysis and factchecks, and publish a daily and weekly email briefing. 

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