In 1993, when Peter Newell said he was going to do a PhD on the politics of climate change, his first academic supervisor suggested he think again. The science was iffy. The politics would be worse. Best to pick a more substantial topic. Had he considered whales?
In the Newell family home in Reading, his father Brian, a company commercial director, and his mother Helen, a nurse, were not inclined to dispute what sounded like sensible advice. But Newell pressed ahead with an academic career fixed on the idea that only one thing would stop the gathering threat of climate change.
It would not be clever green tech, or well-meant financial reforms, or the mounting scientific evidence that humans were heating the planet to unnerving levels. It was the balance in political power surrounding all this that had to change, Newell believed, especially when it came to the fossil fuels at the heart of the climate problem. “It just seemed obvious,” he says.