Skip to main content
NEU Senior Industrial Organiser
Keystone COPout
Britain doesn’t lack options for the radical decarbonisation of its economy, we just lack the leadership and vision to deliver it, argues ALAN SIMPSON

SOMETIMES there are events that make you rail in anger. Others make you weep. Reading the government’s plethora of “net-zero” policy papers ahead of November’s Cop26 climate conference, I could barely hold back the tears.

It wasn’t their lack of ambition but the absence of a route map (with sufficient resources and urgency) that made the proclamations such a painful read. 

We were asked to ignore huge rafts of policies that will make the crisis worse, in exchange for promises that might make it manageable.

 

Governed by pygmies

 

Rail and regionalisation

 

Swapping and sharing

 

Obsessions with growth

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
Similar stories
INTERMINABLE DELAYS: The lifting of a 245-tonne steel dome onto Hinkley Point C's second reactor building, at in Bridgwater, Somerset on July 17 2025 - scheduled to be finished by 2025 it now won’t be until 2031
Features / 6 December 2025
6 December 2025

The Communist Party of Britain’s Congress last month debated a resolution on ending opposition to all nuclear power in light of technological advances and the climate crisis. RICHARD HEBBERT explains why

MODERN FEUDALISM:
New US President Donald
Trump
Features / 30 January 2025
30 January 2025
Some hard political choices must be made in Trump’s post-truth era – starting by abandoning any illusions about the ‘special relationship’ and waking up to the need for bold policy-making on the climate, argues ALAN SIMPSON
THE WAY FORWARD: A general view of the Viking windfarm SSE R
Features / 17 January 2025
17 January 2025
Thanks to impressive progress in Britain with wind and solar generation, clean electricity now costs a fraction of the price of gas — yet the current system keeps bills artificially high to protect fossil fuels, writes TOM HARDY