In taking on the anti-fracking movement, Minister of State for Energy, Andrea Leadsom has highlighted just how bad Britain’s energy predicament is.  In a briefing note on the Politics Home website she states: “As things stand, we have 40% of our gas being supplied from the North Sea basin and …

Alaska is the latest place to be taught an important lesson about the curse of oil. The curse is that the income a state derives from selling oil is sufficient to obviate the need to develop a balanced and prosperous economic base.  This is all too obvious in the Middle East, …

In any discussion of UK energy policy, we have come to expect Energy Ministers to appear upbeat even as the UK’s margin between supply and demand slips into the red.  But move to a different context – such as the current in/out UK referendum campaign – and the veil may slip …

Western oil markets rallied briefly on the announcement of another meeting of oil producers in Doha on 17 April to discuss freezing oil output.  However, critics point out that the only countries (e.g. Russia) that have agreed to “freeze” their production are those that have no additional capacity to spare …

Scotland’s last coal fired power station at Longannet is set to close later today as its last reserves of coal are burned up.  While environmental groups have welcomed the demise of the 2,400MW power station (for a comparison, this is nearly five times the output of Britain’s biggest offshore wind …

It is time to face up to what should have become obvious by now…  Westminster has had it day.  The time has come to see it as the folly it always was, and bring it to an end. No, this is not a call to grab your pitchforks and burning …

Price is not the only consideration when we purchase electrical appliances.  Energy use is also a factor.  This is because an appliance with a poor energy rating will end up costing several hundred pounds more to run over its lifetime.  So paying £50 or £100 more for an energy efficient …

If we could stop climate change where it is now, UK citizens would enjoy several benefits according to the mainstream media this week. First, there is the story that we have been enjoying highly favourable wine producing conditions.  As Time magazine (among many others) observes: “If you find yourself a little …

For all of the talk about emissions reduction, we are now adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere ten times faster than at any time in at least 66 million years according to new research in the journal Nature Geoscience: “Given currently available palaeorecords, we conclude that the present anthropogenic carbon …

Writing in the Guardian, Michael Slezak lists nine ways in which climate records were broken in 2015: 2015 was the warmest year on record, “0.76C above the 1961-90 average” (note that commentators no longer use the start of the industrial revolution – 1750 – as this would provide a more …