How We Can Save the Planet Penguin Books, 2004 (with Tina Fawcett)

The Suicidal Planet: How to Prevent Global Climate Catastrophe St. Martin’s Press, 2007 (with Tina Fawcett and Sudhir Chella Rajan) 

Afterword: Where do we go from here? in Surviving Climate Change: The Struggle to Avert Global Catastrophe (eds. David Cromwell and Mark Levine), Pluto Press, 2007

These publications set out why climate change is the single biggest problem that humankind has ever had to face, as we continue with lifestyles that are way beyond the planet’s limits. They explain the real issues that must be focused on: what role technology can play, how individuals and their communities can make changes, and why governments must take the lead and act now to protect our planet for later generations. They also call for the latent cross-party consensus to ensure that progress is not impeded by conventional politics. And they propose the introduction of a radical rationing scheme to reduce individual carbon outputs to a fair and ecologically safe level. The books include helpful guidelines for the home, travel, and leisure. 

• Colin Challen, MP, sets up the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Climate Change (APPGCC) in 2005.
• DEFRA Press Notice, 19 July 2006 describes how the Government is looking at Personal Carbon Allowances (PCAs) to combat rising domestic carbon emissions, with a new cross-departmental group set up to examine new policy options. The strategy was endorsed by David Miliband, when Secretary of State at DEFRA, at a meeting at the RSA in December 2006 and later when he was Secretary of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in December 2007. On both occasions, he referred to PCAs as a "new currency" and a means of benefiting people on low incomes as they would be able to sell their excess allowances.
• My passionate advocacy of the urgency with which action must be taken to avert climate catastrophe has been echoed by others including Sir John Houghton who described climate change as "a weapon of mass destruction", and by the UK government's chief scientist at the time, Sir David King, as a "more serious threat to world security than terrorism". To read further, click here. 

 
Towards the next environmental white paper, Policy Studies, Spring 1991

This article put forward the concept of the Conserver Gains Principle to complement the Polluter Pays Principle. Included in it was the calculation that to meet the recommended IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) global cut of carbon dioxide emissions on an equity base, emissions per capita in the UK would have to be reduced from their then current level of just under ten tonnes to less than one tonne. It therefore proposed a strategy in which individuals would be allocated a basic annual ration together with a second level of coupons to be traded on the open market. As an outcome of this article, my subsequent research and many papers since 1990 have pressed the case for carbon rationing as the only realistic way for the world's population to prevent serious damage from climate change. These have discussed the implications for future policy on public health, planning, construction, transport, aviation and international tourism.

• This proposal, developed later by David Fleming, Director of the Lean Institute, was cited in a European Commission document in September 1998 entitled "Domestic Tradable Quotas (DTQs) as an Instrument to Reduce Carbon Dioxide Emissions". Since then, a considerable body of research on Personal Carbon Allowances and DTQs has been conducted at the Tyndall Centre, Manchester University and at the Environmental Research Centre, Oxford University.