He was an outspoken critic of the architecture of the Kyoto Protocol, and his paper The Wrong Trousers: Radically Rethinking Climate Policy,[4] co-written with Gwyn Prins of the London School of Economics has been widely cited on this topic.

In 2008, he was listed by Wired Magazine as one of the 15 people the next President should listen to[5] and was recognized for his contribution to the joint award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Influenced by his PhD supervisor and colleague, the anthropologist Dame Mary Douglas, his underlying theoretical interest was in the use of ideas about nature to justify moral and political preferences.

He focused particularly on the tendency of Trotskyist sects and the Maoist Workers' Institute of Marxism–Leninism – Mao Zedong Thought group to factionalism and split as well as their propensity to entertain millenarian ideas of social change.

Previously, he was Deputy Director of the Global Environmental Studies Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory where he was responsible for research in Policy, Energy and Human Systems.

His work has been covered by the New York Times,[14] BBC,[15] Economist,[16] New Scientist,[17] Guardian,[18] Nature,[19] Sky News, Globe and Mail[20] and Wired Magazine[21] among others.