
Hello. I’m an engineer. I live in Brighton in the UK. I
work for an American charity called Give Directly that gives
no-strings-attached cash to the poorest people, mostly in Africa, to
eliminate extreme poverty.
Before that I worked at a small firm in Lewes that helps children’s nurseries and whose
main product was Tapestry, an online
learning journal. Before that, I was a Deputy Director at the UK Department
of Energy and Climate Change. I also do occasional freelance work
through Green on Black
Ltd.
Perhaps you are looking for information about my:
- History
- PhD
- Programming
If this list doesn’t cover what you want then feel free to contact me
at tom@counsell.org.
News
- I’ve enjoyed making a server load monitor out of a
65 year old ammeter for my boss.
- Very sad that David MacKay
has died. He taught me so much.
- I helped the Australian Food,
Energy, Environment and Water Network turn their Excel model of Food
and Water scenarios into an interactive site.
- I have left DECC. Not because I didn’t like DECC. But because I have
had enough of commuting from Brighton to London. I’m now working at a
tiny local firm that helps children’s
nurseries,
- Almost my last act at DECC was to create short film about how
we supply and use energy in the UK. It was based on a talk I gave
last year in London.
- I don’t like Marginal
Abatement Cost Curves, but some colleagues at DECC really do. They
are also annoying to do in Excel, so I created a chart generator to help them
out.
- Created a ‘flying brick’
chart generator
because they are a bit annoying to draw in Excel.
- Together with ITRI we hosted a
conference in Taipei for all the countries
that are working on 2050 calculators. Premier Mao opened
the event, and an awesome group of high school children put on a play
about the difficulty of agreeing what to do about energy in Taiwan.
- We’re writing a book on how to
make a 2050 calculator.
- Some great responses to the launch of our Global Calculator. One of my
favourites is the headline of the article in the Telegraph: “Hate
wind farms? Eat chicken, not beef.”
- Created an automatic marginal
abatement cost curve generator for the Global Calculator.
- Produced a Cates plot for
statins showing side effects for my wife’s blog post.
- My team have released a draft Global Calculator that allows
you to try out different standards of living and the energy system that
supports them, and then see the consequences for climate change and
fossil fuel reserves. We are looking for expert feedback on the draft,
so we can make it awesome in time for a December release. I blogged
about it at DECC.
- A bit of fun for my daughter’s birthday party—How loud does a
dinosaur roar? (only works in Chrome browsers)
- I’ve updated my units calculator to be a single page web app
- With my team’s help, India have launched their version of a 2050
calculator. They have done a great job with their documentation. I
blogged about it at DECC
- My team won a second Civil
Service Award for Analysis and Use of Evidence, joint with the
Foreign Office. Well done guys.
- With my team’s help, Taiwan have launched their version of a 2050
calculator. It looks awesome. Ewan Bennie went to the launch and blogged about
it.
- I am quite proud of the legends on the new charts in the 2050
calculator. Did them in D3 which was a
pleasure. See
the code.
- My team has started to develop a 2050 calculator for the world, watch the video
message’s about the project.
- Finished reading Thinking in
Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers by Richard E. Neustadt,
Ernest R. May
- I have been working on a tangle for exploring
when nuclear-powered-electricity might be cheaper than
gas-powered-electricity
- I’ve produced a sankey diagram showing (approximately) the 2010 Energy Flows through the UK
- 700 people paid to debate the future of the UK energy system at the
2013 Hay festival. I was on stage as the DECC geek. You can listen
to it or read about it on
the DECC blog.
- At the last minute, I stepped in to replace David MacKay at the
first British
Energy Challenge roadshow in Liverpool. Watch the
highlights.
- I blogged on the DECC blog about China’s
2050 Calculator (local
copy) and the common
problem of consensus (local
copy).
Elsewhere on the internet