The Big Picture Policy Blog

The Extinction Rebellion protests that have now been ongoing in London since 15th April have been amazing to watch - heartening to those of us who are increasingly gripped by fear over how the world will look by the time we reach our parents' age (if we even get that chance) - but have also, through the opposition that they have received, helped to highlight exactly why the challenge of tackling the growing climate crisis may well be beyond us. My posts up to this point have been proposing single, specific (albeit large-scale) policy changes in a particular policy area, but today's will go beyond that, and into the need not just for revolutionary policy, but for a revolution in the philosophy of what it means to be a citizen of an endangered world, and how the economic and political structures we currently exist within may well need to be the next major casualties of climate change. We face a world of hunger, hardship and destruction if we continue down this p...

Before we start, cards on the table: meat is delicious, and I love it. I am not about to try to make people feel bad for eating meat when a rare steak in a country pub is one of my greatest pleasures. Smashing burgers for friends at the weekend and imagining myself quitting my office job to sling hot beef from a hip food truck are both things that get me through the demoralising days sat staring at a screen. However, the Western diet – which, as rapidly developing countries in the far East and elsewhere attain greater levels of disposable income and consume more and more meat , is becoming ever more popular – is leading us quicker and further down the path to climate crisis, with the environmental impacts of the production methods of our industrialised meat and dairy industries becoming ever more noticeable. Global livestock accounts for 14.5% of anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions (more than transport, by comparison), of which 65% comes from beef. I propose taxing be...

So much of public policy is reactive, and the recent dire IPCC report evidencing that we have just 12 years to avoid a potentially irreversible climate crisis should be enough to spark an unprecedented reaction. In the wake of the 1996 Port Arthur shooting, the Australian government introduced sweeping changes to its gun laws, most notable amongst which was a government buy-back scheme that, in the twelve months it was in place, bought back and destroyed more than 1 million firearms that had recently been made illegal, funded by a one-off increase in the Medicare levy paid by Australian citizens to raise the required A$500million. There was strong opposition in some quarters, but the conservative Howard government pressed ahead with the policies; in the seven years following the buy-back, gun-homicides fell by roughly 42 percent, and gun suicides fell even further, by almost 57 percent. The policy was controversial and costly, but it was an undeniable public good, and has since ...