Although the current UK government is bending over backward to facilitate shale gas fracking, there are still many hurdles that energy companies will have to cross if they are even to recover any gas according to Caroline Almond at Natural Law Review: “Despite strong UK Government backing in relation to …

At the height of the Falklands War in 1982, Elvis Costello penned the lyrics of the song Shipbuilding.  The song reflected on the moral conflict that arose because the war saved some of the jobs in Britain’s fast declining shipyards.  The song asks us to consider whether our need to …

What do the Adriatic coast, Oman, Papua New Guinea and Caledonia have in common? They all have large deposits of Peridotite – a silicate rock that could play a huge part in mitigating climate change. Scientists at the Earth Science Research Centre at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman have been …

Delegates at a recent IPPR Community Energy event heard that England’s urban poor were losing out on community energy schemes that were set up to help them. According to Taylor Heyman at Power Technology: “The Rural Community Energy Fund (RCEF) and Urban Community Energy Fund (UCEF) were set up in …

Public support for renewable energy is very high according to the latest issue of the DECC Public Attitudes Tracker.  Eighty-one percent of us now favour renewable energy, while just four percent oppose it and two percent strongly oppose it.  This is in stark contrast to public attitudes toward the UK …

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 …