Articles by Ben Tuxworth

What will London’s new mayor, Boris Johnson, do for the environment?

Ben Tuxworth, communications director at Forum for the Future, writes a monthly column for Gristmill on sustainability in the U.K. and Europe.

Boris Johnson is mayor of London. It's pretty surprising to many of us here, including a fair number of political commentators and, I'd be willing to bet, even a number of the people who voted for him. It's hard to imagine an American equivalent. George Bush as president has some of the connotations, but lacks the class overtones (Johnson is an old Etonian) that we find so irresistible in Britain.

Johnson's trademarks thus far in his political career have been saying what he thinks (sounds great, but includes occasionally referring to black people as "picaninnies"), being posh and funny, and having blond hair. Despite being a senior member of the Conservative team, in his media appearances he is charmingly off-message, with a self-deprecating gag to deflect any serious questions. He's become a sort of mascot for English love of wit but hatred of the intellectual.

So far so good, but compared to the previous mayor, Ken Livingstone, who battled Maggie Thatcher for the soul of London in the '80s and who defined the new office of London mayor, Johnson seems almost willfully lightweight, with no policy record and no real policies, particularly on the environment. Beyond the knee-jerk stuff -- fight crime! get rid of bendy buses! affordable housing for all! -- Johnson's campaign has been very short on specifics. "This guy is just fumbling around," Arnold Schwarzenegger said after seeing him speak at a conference last year.

U.K.’s Labor Party embraces nuclear but is slow to move on the big climate challenge

Ben Tuxworth, communications director at Forum for the Future, writes a monthly column for Gristmill on sustainability in the U.K. and Europe.

The British press swooned over the visit of Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni to the U.K. late last month. We're suckers for the idea of French romance, particularly mixed with wealth, sophistication, and the sort of impetuosity we "rosbifs" can seldom muster. Apparently, Bruni saw Sarkozy on TV and said to a friend, "I want to have a man with nuclear power." And what Bruni wants, Bruni gets.

It's unclear whether Sarkozy knew it was his big machinery that attracted Bruni, but a man who is willing to wear high heels to appear as tall as his glamorous spouse clearly has security issues high on his agenda. As it happens, the new entente cordiale between Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is based, amongst other things, on a shared passion for the atom.

Together, Britain and France will supply the world with nuclear technology, simultaneously saving the industry, creating thousands of jobs, and sorting our energy security issues. I've already explored why these arguments don't really stack up. The Labor Party's newfound zeal for nuclear power -- and Business Secretary John Hutton's recent speech in which he said expanded nuclear power could be akin to North Sea oil for the British economy -- make these interesting times to ask what the legacy of New Labor will be for the environment. It still seems as if, at some fundamental level, they just don't get it.

New survey of U.K. youth reveals mixed attitudes about the future of the planet

Ben Tuxworth, communications director at Forum for the Future, writes a monthly column for Gristmill on sustainability in the U.K. and Europe.

Debates about how we should save the planet tend to explore the impossibility of almost every approach until someone says, "We need to change the education system," at which point it is deemed churlish to snigger. Catch 'em young, and it's job done seems to be the hope. Well, with only 100 months of planet-saving time left, according to Greenpeace, this approach has worked as much as it is ever likely to. So, are the young going to save us?

Fresh perspective comes from the Future Leaders Survey, a scan of 25,000 applicants to U.K. universities and colleges published last month. The survey, carried out by Forum for the Future and UCAS (the central admissions service for higher education in the U.K.), paints a picture of young Brits facing a fairly terrifying future with an odd mixture of denial, irritation, and pragmatism.

British government embraces a nuclear-powered future

Ben Tuxworth, communications director at Forum for the Future, is the new author of Brit's Eye View, a monthly Gristmill column on sustainability in the U.K. and Europe. The column was previously written by Tuxworth's colleague Peter Madden.

After much delay, the British government started the new year with an announcement on nuclear power generation. It seems they have finally succumbed to the prevailing industry logic, which says that we need big bits of power-generating kit to plug into the grid to provide base loading, and nuclear is the perfect low-carbon solution. And because investment in any other possible solution -- particularly energy-efficiency measures and renewable technologies -- has been so poor over the last 20 years, it is now the only answer to a coming crisis in energy provision.

The crisis is with us because the existing fleet of stations in the U.K. is either already obsolete or coming up for decommissioning in the next few years. Paradoxically, this eases the question of where to build: most of the new plants will be built on existing sites. These sites are on the coast, raising interesting questions about the effect of sea-level change, but for now they're the obvious choice as, despite industry claims about improved safety, it will be very difficult to find new localities in which nuclear power plants are welcome.

Presenting nuclear as the best option for the U.K. seems to require pretty healthy doses of both wishful thinking and faith in hope over experience. Bringing this new generation of power stations online in time to meet the gap in supply means they must be up and running in 10 years, very close to the theoretical minimum from decision to delivery. The only other station being built in Europe at present, in Finland, is two years into construction and already two years late, and $1 billion over budget. To speed things up, we have to wish away objectors and hobble the planning system, for which special legislation is already proposed.

But the big debate at present is what the true cost of these installations will be. Who will pay for building, running, and more importantly decommissioning them, and management of the waste over the coming millennia? The British government is anxious to avoid any suggestion that the taxpayer will pick up the tab, despite the fact that no nuclear reactor in history has been built without state subsidy. Order-of-magnitude underestimations of costs -- some of which are simply unknown -- litter the history of the industry, and government bailouts have been the consistent consequence.