Large forests such as the Amazon rainforest act as the land-based lungs of the planet; absorbing carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen.  Within limits, this process can offset some of the carbon released into the atmosphere by human activity.  However, in a new paper in Global Change Biology, scientists from Stanford …

A little known – but costly – fact about your electricity bill is that around 20 percent of what you pay is determined by where you live.  This is because energy companies charge customers according to the distance between their home and the power station; this allows the cost of …

The intermittency problem is the biggest barrier to renewable energy generation.  We cannot run our economy solely on wind and solar energy because there are too many times when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing.  So, like it or not, until such time as new …

Following the collapse of the Doha talks to freeze oil production, many analysts had expected oil prices to fall.  In the end, prices remained fairly stable – although still a long way short of their 2014 peak.  One reason why this might have happened is that the oil glut has moved …

Those of us lucky enough to live in the developed economies of Western Europe have been fortunate enough to avoid the worst effects of climate change despite being largely responsible for it… until now.  But a new study in the journal Climatic Change has found that this is about to …

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) says that increased methane release in the Condamine River in Queensland is “unlikely” to be due to fracking.  In an interview in the Guardian, CSIRO responded to a video posted to Facebook by Green MP Jeremy Buckingham.  The video shows Buckingham setting …

The end of the 2015/16 financial year has seen a wave of insolvencies in the renewable energy sector according to the Yorkshire Post.  The wave of bankruptcies and redundancies are directly attributable to the UK government’s decision to scrap subsidies and impose new taxes on the industry: “According to the …

Economists and politicians have been reassured that there is twice as much oil beneath the ground as humanity has used to date.  However, international security expert Nafeez Ahmed argues that nearly half of the 1.7 trillion barrels of oil still to be recovered does not actually exist. The discrepancy, reported …

Britain’s top banks are set for one of their worst first-quarter earnings seasons since the financial crisis, according to Lawrence White and Andrew Macaskill at Reuters: “Despite shoring up their capital bases and paying out strong dividends, the five biggest banks – HSBC (HSBA.L), Barclays (BARC.L), Standard Chartered (STAN.L), Lloyds …

Hedge fund tycoon Crispin Odey and Societe Generale strategist Albert Edwards have both separately warned that another banking crisis is looming; and both believe central bank monetary policy is to blame.  According to Odey bank profitability is falling: “Banks need rights issues to deal with these losses but why would …