How and when will we transition to a clean energy future? How will the transition empower individuals and transform global power dynamics? How did China become the world’s first electrostate, leading the drive for renewable energy, and what can we learn from this?

Richard Black spent 15 years as a science and environment correspondent for the BBC World Service and BBC News, before setting up the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit. He now lives in Berlin and is the Director of Policy and Strategy at the global clean energy think tank Ember, which aims to accelerate the clean energy transition with data and policy.

He is the author of The Future of Energy; Denied:The Rise and Fall of Climate Contrarianism, and is an Honorary Research Fellow at Imperial College London.

“So I rest on the contention that in a world that had already gone through the clean energy transition, Vladimir Putin could not have nurtured Europe’s dependence on Russia; could not have filled his war chests; could not have attempted to blackmail the EU into submission; and would not have been able, therefore, to attempt the invasion of Ukraine.

–The Future of Energy, p.76

“Environment of Peace: Security in a New Era of Risk is a report that I was fortunate enough to take part in writing a couple of years ago, courtesy of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The report is out there, available for download. It's a landmark report linking environmental destruction to conflict risk through all kinds of mechanisms and linking peace building and environmental restoration. The links, some of them are quite obvious, and others are a little bit more subtle. There are short-term things, and there are long-term things, and there's a role for international institutions, as well as national governments. So, in the short term, let's put a sticking plaster on the issue. The main recommendations that come out of the report, for example, environmental peace building, where you try and tackle an environmental issue alongside conflict resolution and so on, is something that could be used a lot more and United Nations agencies and other organizations can really take this on board and build this into all of their operations. But the longer-term stuff, the number one thing is to just get off fossil fuels. Because all the while we're using fossil fuels, we're going to be emitting carbon dioxide into the air and causing climate change to progress further.”

https://mhpbooks.com/books/the-future-of-energy
https://ember-climate.org/about/people/richard-black
https://ember-climate.org
www.therealpress.co.uk/?s=Richard+black

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