Oliver Tickell

Oliver Tickell    (author, journalist)
Born	29 July 1958

Oliver Tickell is a UK journalist and author who has written extensively and campaigned on health and environmental issues. Oliver Tickell’s articles have been published in all the broadsheet newspapers and numerous magazines including New Scientist, New Statesman and The Economist. He is also a popular speaker and experienced broadcaster on the BBC home and world services including Today, PM, Costing the Earth, Farming World and Farming Today. He is a founding fellow of the Green Economic Institute.

In October 2013, when Oliver Tickell was appointed editor of The Ecologist online magazine, Satish Kumar, editor-in-chief of The Resurgence Trust, said:

"We are delighted that Oliver Tickell has accepted the role of editor of The Ecologist. He is a great writer, committed to ecological issues and will bring tremendous energy to The Ecologist website."

Oliver Tickell responded:

"I am very excited to be taking on this role. The Resurgence Trust is a fantastic place for The Ecologist to be. I have been reading The Ecologist since the 1980s and am ever-mindful of its values and principles. My aim is to manifest those values in a different media landscape and I particularly want to make the website more interactive so it becomes a focus for ideas and debate serving the green movement."

Carping by Private Eye

Private Eye rumbles "Haselnut" and The Ecologist

Following publication in The Ecologist of two articles by former diplomat Patrick Haseldine ("Why Flight 103?" and "Flight 103: it was the Uranium") Lockerbie researcher John Ashton wrote an impetuous piece in Private Eye magazine (No. 1358, 24 January - 6 February 2014, "Street of Shame", page 7) titled "Private Eye rumbles 'Haselnut' and The Ecologist" which was critical of the new editor, Oliver Tickell:

"Most hacks and news organisations have long blocked or junked rants from the Lockerbie bombing conspiracy theorist Patrick Haseldine. Not so The Ecologist magazine.

"Oliver Tickell, the new editor, has just published 'the shocking truth' of Lockerbie by the man who styles himself 'Emeritus Professor of Lockerbie Studies'.

"'Haselnut' has long claimed that Pan Am 103 was blown up by the apartheid South African government in order to kill an unfortunate Swedish passenger, Bernt Carlsson, the UN Assistant Secretary-General and UN Commissioner for Namibia.

"As well as aiming various far-fetched accusations over the years at people connected to the Lockerbie investigations and trials, Haseldine has also claimed that he was 'nominated' for last year’s Private Eye Paul Foot Award – by which he meant he had in fact submitted his own material for consideration."

On 22 January 2014, Oliver Tickell commented on Facebook:

"My first appearance in this Esteemed Organ. It could have been a lot worse. I should be thankful for the publicity."

On 6 January 2016, he added:

"I note the article has been quietly picking up FB Likes over the last year, now up to 907. It is obviously still being read and my guess is it's been quite widely referenced / cited."

Kyoto2

"How to Manage the Global Greenhouse"

In July 2008, Oliver Tickell's book "Kyoto2: How to Manage the Global Greenhouse" was published (Zed Books Ltd ISBN 978-1848130258). The book description reads:

Kyoto2, by writer, journalist and broadcaster Oliver Tickell puts forward a strikingly original new solution to the tentative, failed steps of the Kyoto Protocol. Using a system of finite production rights for greenhouse gases, which would be traded by organisations on a global auction, Kyoto2 seeks to succeed where the original agreement failed. Regulated by an independent body, the funds could be poured back into healing the wounds inflicted by climate change. In his combination of idealism with realistic proposals, Tickell exposes the flaws in current approaches, and envisions a fairer and more effective system.

Environmentalist George Monbiot wrote this review:

"The most intelligent treatment of the politics and economics of climate change I have ever read. Brilliant, clear and unanswerable"

Another review (dated 11 August 2008 and headed "the only book you need on climate change") reads:

This is the best book on climate change policy I have read so far. Whilst it is very readable and offers an excellent introduction to the basics, it does not shy away from the essential scientific and technical material that anyone with a serious interest in climate change needs to know. As well as helping me to understand other scholars ideas that I had at times found difficult to follow, it develops them into an overall plan that is sophisticated and yet so simple it makes you wonder why they're not yet international policy!

Information Technologist

Oliver Tickell has worked as an information technologist since 1981 in a variety of IT roles, first at Peregrine Systems of Irvine, California, then at Management Systems and Programming (MSP) in London, and at MSP Inc in Lexington, Massachusetts.

After nearly five years as Development Director, Oliver Tickell became Chief Executive of Quintessence Systems Ltd of Oxford in December 2012, which is a software tool vendor with groundbreaking technology capable of migrating legacy source code from one programming language into another.