Author Archives: Catherine Dawson

On the 8th June an Environmental Audit Committee session heard that “To meet 1.5C, we need to think about the impact of our production in the global context. 60 % of oil and gas reserves globally need to stay in the ground. For the UK, we need to see a 6-7% reduction in production annually.” Michael Lewis, Chairman of E.on, stated that insulating 19 million houses would save the equivalent energy output of 6 nuclear power stations, and tweeted that putting solar panels on new-build houses was a ‘no brainer’. What we don’t need is new oil and gas field developments – was COP26 that long ago?

There has been growing acknowledgement worldwide that there is a need for a globally applied carbon pricing policy which would show the true cost of fossil fuel reliance and which, by gradually pricing fossil fuels out of the mix, would facilitate the implementation of renewable energy and carbon sequestration. Calls for such a policy came from the IMF last year. A recent paper in Nature and report by the Autonomy think tank have shown how a carbon pricing policy such as Climate Income in which the revenue is returned equally to the populace as a dividend, if applied globally, would benefit the Global South.

The civil society advisers to the G7 are now adding to the call for comprehensive and just carbon pricing. Citizens’ Climate Lobby International has a useful summary of the various requests and a petition to ask the G7 to heed the call of its civil society advisers. Please consider adding your name and disseminating.