On 7 July 2023, the Mayor of Glastonbury discussed the Council's Net Zero Carbon Policy with several speakers and an enthusiastic audience at Glastonbury Town Hall. The event was chaired by Sandy Adams.
Peter Taylor
Peter Taylor MI Biol MRAI was educated at Oxford University (1967-1970, 1976-1980) with degrees in both natural and social sciences. Leaving the academic environment, he founded and developed an independent Oxford-based research group, the Political Ecology Research Group (1977-1992), specialising in scientific and legal support for citizen initiatives and environmental policy in the UK and Europe.
PERG has advised local, regional and national governments, the European Commission, the European Parliament, the United Nations International Maritime Organization, Greenpeace International, trade unions and the media. He subsequently founded Terramarès, an international consultancy specialising in terrestrial and marine ecosystems and pollution policy, and contributed to the introduction and development of the Precautionary Principle and Clean Production Strategy at the United Nations.
In 1997 he moved to Glastonbury as a single parent and, with Richard Fraser, founded Ethos, a communications consultancy specialising in computer visualisation techniques. From 2000 to 2004 he worked with government departments investigating the impacts of climate change and renewable energy strategies, served on the government's Community Renewable Energy Advisory Group, reviewed the report of the Royal Commission on Energy and Climate Change and worked with the Countryside Agency in developing a visioning tool for integrating renewable energy with landscape, community and biodiversity objectives. He also reviewed computer model projections of climate change for the Countryside Commission.
His expertise is in the use of computer modelling of ocean-atmosphere systems and he has published in scientific journals and lectured at a number of universities including Oxford, Cambridge, London, Birmingham, Tokyo, Leeds, Newcastle, Swansea and Keele. His reviews of climate change science are Cold: Reassessing Global Warming Policy, In it he argued that global warming, although real, was largely natural, that the Earth was cooling, and that if carbon dioxide was as effective as the models predicted, it could stop the Earth from cooling. But he thought that the heating power of carbon dioxide was overestimated, and that the models ignored natural cycles. The book was reviewed in a leading paleoclimate science journal as must-read, second only to the IPCC predictions.
After the book received strong negative reactions from former environmental activists, he retired from public life and started working with Professor Jackson Davis at the California Institute of Environmental Studies. They have published a joint paper on the analysis of Earth cycles in ice core data. As a result of this work, he was invited as a keynote speaker at the 3rd Global Warming Science Conference in Prague in 2019, where he presented on the limitations of model projections. His paper on the natural causes of climate change is currently under peer review.
In addition to his critical scientific reviews of pollution and environmental policy, he serves as a Trustee of the British Nature Conservancy, where he pioneered the concepts of rewilding and landscape-scale management. Beyond Conservation Year 2005, Wild In 2011, The spirit of wildness 2017. He is a Trustee of Cumbrian Wildwood, a conservation charity in Mid Wales, founder and collaborator of the Wildlands Institute at the University of Leeds, and a founding member of the Institute for Life-Based Building in Germany.
A Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, she has presented seminars at the World Anthropological Congress (British Museum, 2016) on the social dimensions of renewable energy planning and gender issues in climate science (why computer predictions don't include cycles), and has an abiding interest (and practice) in yogic science and shamanic dance.
Thanks to Sandi Adams, Eli Everyman, and Matthew Williams for their emceeing and technical support on the evening.
