Consult Climate is chugging along, but slowly. I currently split my time between the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), Consult Climate and the e-nvironmentalist — roughly in that order. For ECIU, I manage the Net Zero Tracker, an international consortium project between ourselves, Oxford Net Zero, NewClimate Institute and the DataDriven EnviroLab.

The Tracker is the definitive net zero register of countries, states and regions, cities and the world’s largest 2,000 companies, an essential transparency tool through which stakeholders of all kinds can hold governments and companies to account – rigorous enough for analysts and decision-makers, accessible enough for journalists and campaigners.

John Lang

John Lang

LLM, LLB, BA (Hist)

It dawned on me after completing my undergraduate degrees: I still didn’t have the foggiest idea about the world that I lived in. What was this recession all about? What was Al Gore spouting on about? I decided to read — really read. It started off pretty simple: Bill Bryson, Ha Joon Chang and Carl Sagan. It soon got more complicated: Jeffrey Sachs, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Noam Chomsky, Jonathan Haidt. Then I just got confused: Stephen Pinker, Daniel Kahneman, Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith. Eventually though, somewhere indeterminate, a side strand had developed: Tim Flannery, Naomi Oreskes, James Hansen, Elizabeth Kolbert, Mark Lynas and Michael Mann. A problem for me, and for us.

Climate change is fast becoming the story of this century, and if we don’t get our skates on, it’ll fast become the never-ending story of next.

The e-nvironmentalist, effectively my blog, was created not because I’ve ever considered myself an environmentalist, but instead to raise awareness about what’s at stake. For similar reasons, The Climate Trunk will attempt to make the most narratively impaired story of our future more compelling and accessible today.