It was all meant to be so different.  Riding high after an unexpected election victory, and free from the moderating hand of his LibDem coalition partners, George Osborne was finally free to introduce full-blown Tory economic policies. It started to unravel almost immediately, of course.  The plan to cut the …

Climate denial is primarily an article of faith that boils down to “don’t take my privilege away!”  Indeed, it is no accident that climate change denial is most prominent among rich old white men (step forward Donald Trump).  However, the task of calling out the deniers is hampered by their …

We could be seeing the worst case scenario for climate change, according to Eric Mack at Forbes: “Here’s a few brutal facts about what’s been going on since October of 2015: The past seven months have been the hottest, based on global averages, that any human alive today has ever …

The shadow banking sector is made up of companies that act as intermediaries in the credit market; arranging loans that regulated banks could not or would not want to make directly.  They are the same kind of companies that acted as intermediaries arranging all of those sub-prime mortgage loans that …

The rise of Donald Trump and – to a lesser degree – Bernie Sanders is inexplicable to most professional pundits.  Trump was supposed to be a joke candidate who was widely expected to fall at the first hurdle.  The Republican Party was bound to opt for a Washington insider like …

Proposals from the Competition and Markets Authority to empower customers to switch banks are an inadequate response to the wrong problem according to Christine Berry at the New Economics Foundation: “They’re calling for customers to receive more information about their accounts and alerts when they’re nearly overdrawn, as well as …

The latest figures from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies showed that April’s temperature was the highest on record – the seventh month in a row in which global temperature records have been broken. According to Ciara Linnane at Market Watch: “It was the hottest April on record, the data …

Renewables and nuclear will be the fastest growing energy sources by 2040 according to the latest projections from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).  Renewables are expected to grow by 2.6 percent per year and nuclear by 2.3 percent; with the highest growth rates in developing, non-OECD states. Unfortunately, almost …

Competition in the renewable energy sector is about to heat up, says Selina Williams at the Wall Street Journal.  This is because major global oil and gas companies such as Royal Dutch Shell and Total have begun to invest in the sector: “While the investments of Europe’s biggest energy companies …

New Nuclear Watch Europe, an industry-funded pressure group, called on ministers to review which nuclear projects are most likely to be built, according to Kiran Stacey at the Financial Times.  In particular, ongoing problems with the Hinkley Point C project threaten to undermine the whole industry: “Other projects are currently …