The past six months have been an eventful time for TEQs, with new additions to our team, a new name for our organisation and a new website on the go.
We've also become aware that some of you haven't been receiving our recent newsletters due to increasingly paranoid spam guards, so if this is the first you've heard from us in a while, welcome back! An archive of our earlier newsletters can be found here.
So here's a summary of all that we've been up to. Let us know what you think of the new format.
Our new name
In memory of Dr. David Fleming (1940-2010), the man who invented TEQs way back in 1996, the organisation campaigning for TEQs will henceforth be known as The Fleming Policy Centre. An honour.
Over the past three years we have been developing an increasingly close relationship with our natural allies at the Resource Cap Coalition, an alliance of over 40 European NGOs. This has now culminated in TEQs being adopted as one of the tools recommended by the RCC in all their advocacy work across Europe, and our joining as one of the six members of their Core Group.
The best academic paper yet on TEQs
In December Dr. Larch Maxey and Matt Finch represented our team at the Royal Society's Radical Emissions Reductions conference, organised by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. This was an excellent event, featuring both formal and informal discussion of 'Personal Carbon Trading' (now the generic academic term for TEQs and related ideas, despite being a little misleading).
As a result of this, three of our directors agreed to co-author a paper on TEQs for a special issue of the academic journal Carbon Management, based on the outputs of the event. The paper is now passing through peer review ahead of publication, with the pre-review version now available. It is the most comprehensive exploration of TEQs yet in academia.
In part thanks to our growing partnership with the Resource Cap Coalition our Managing Director Shaun Chamberlin was invited to speak at the Annual Conference of the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), at which he sat on a panel with the EU Commissioner for the Environment, the Secretary General of the EEB and the Executive Director of the European Environment Agency (see pics above).
TEQs was certainly the most radical proposal discussed there, and several attendees commented that it was refreshing to see discussion of a proposal that actually addresses the scale of our climate/energy challenges head on. A number of useful connections were made for future collaboration.
Shaun's 7 minute talk is available to watch here, with more photos of him at the event here.
Dr. Chris Shaw is another new TEQs ally, based at the University of Oxford's Environmental Change Institute. His work on the excellent 'Climate Crunch' project investigated the reasons underlying the current impasse on adequate climate/energy policy. Out of this has come a recognition that TEQs could provide a key to breaking through this impasse, and so Chris contacted us to explore closer collaboration.
A joint bid is now in for ESRC funding to allow Chris to spend a year working with a wide range of stakeholders to develop understanding of, and engagement with, TEQs. Fingers crossed!