Community Energy Literature Review

Three different approaches to the impacts of climate change are briefly described in this post. The first focussed on public views about five climate issues of wide interest in the UK. The second presented to a UK audience the views of a panel of experts on a wider range of climate issues, with the aim of stimulating interest and action. The third concentrated on the ways in which the benefits from climate mitigation tend to be overlooked in the European context, and how this might be remedied. Citizens’ Panel A recent publication by the Climate Change Committee (CCC) described the work of a Citizens’ Panel on climate adaptation in the UK. The aim of the project was to understand public views on the subject, and so to guide the CCC’s future advice to the UK Government (CCC, 2026). There were two key questions: “Which of the impacts of climate change are you most concerned about and why?” and “What do you think should be done to adapt to these impacts?” The panel worked on five aspe...

A recently published article from the Centre for Climate Integrity marked ten years since “investigative journalists first exposed Exxon’s secret internal climate knowledge and campaign of deception”. The journalists were from Inside Climate News, the Los Angeles Times and Columbia Journalism School, and their investigations and reports became known as #ExxonKnew. Exxon was not the only company which decided to “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions” about climate change and to execute decades-long campaigns of climate deception (CfCI, 2025a). The article claims that Exxon and other Big Oil companies “have faced growing scrutiny and efforts to hold them accountable” during recent years, and that ten U.S. states and many communities have sought to “hold the companies accountable for their deception and make them pay for the damage they’ve caused.” The Road Not Taken   Investigations into Exxon’s early work on climate modelling and its later attempts to conceal th...

Introduction A speaker in a recent discussion on environmental issues remarked that biodiversity always has priority over clean energy. Whatever the truth of this statement, it prompts the question of how we should try to resolve situations where clean energy and biodiversity are in conflict. Certainly the frequent mention of biodiversity in the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations supports its importance, but clean energy also has a role in efforts to control climate change, and compromise may be the best policy if clean energy projects conflict with efforts to preserve and promote biodiversity. Such conflicts and their possible resolution will be examined below (CBD, 2018; Global Goals, 2021). Biodiversity and its importance Biodiversity broadly means “all the different kinds of life” in a given area, “the variety of animals, plants, fungi, and even microorganisms like bacteria that make up our natural world”. It is important to us because it “supports everything...