Stephen Tindale

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Biographical Information

"Stephen Tindale is an associate fellow at the Centre for European Reform, working mainly on energy and climate policy but also on the EU budget. He also runs the website Climate Answers (www.climateanswers.info), which tries to present information on climate issues in an accessible way, and to identify what should be supported rather than simply what should be opposed, as most NGOs do.

"He is co-author, with Prashant Vaze, of the book "Repowering commmunties: Small scale solutions to large scale problems" (Earthscan, June 2011), about the role that local government, co-operatives and community organisations play on energy supply and energy efficiency in Europe and North America. Previous roles have included: Head of Communications and Public Affairs for RWE npower renewables; Executive Director of Greenpeace UK and Chairman of the Greenpeace European Unit; adviser to Environment Minister Michael Meacher; founder of IPPR Environment Group; adviser to Shadow Environment Secretary Chris Smith, diplomat at UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office."

"His wife, a freelance journalist who often works for the Guardian and Newsnight, is very supportive of his antics, but he has not tried to explain to his children, two and five, that he could be jailed. ... He knows what he is talking about: public school and Cambridge-educated, he spent four years in the Foreign Office (third secretary in Islamabad) before leaving to work for Friends of the Earth, and then - via the Fabian Society, the Institute for Public Policy Research, and the Green Alliance - he became a special adviser to Chris Smith when he was shadow environment secretary and to Michael Meacher when environment minister.

"When Tindale arrived at Greenpeace in 2000, Lord Melchett, then its executive director, persuaded him to give an interview criticising the government he had worked for a decade. He said things he still believes in - that the Blair government pays lip service to climate change, that it is too beholden to the idea of nuclear power and ruinously attached to Sellafield, that farm-scale trials of GM crops are a mistake - but the experience was traumatic. "Many of my former colleagues and friends felt betrayed," and he thought, initially, "Oh god, what have I done?" Now he says he was right to take a stand against a government that always plumps for what is populist over what is right. "

Affiliations

• Former visiting fellow, Policy Studies Institute [1]
• Green Alliance: Individual Members