The heady pre-crash days of 2007 were the last time bank CEOs emerged to tell an unsuspecting public that all was well.  Within months, of course, banks and financial companies were falling like dominos and Western finance ministers were desperately looking for a means of preventing a financial meltdown.  The …

For the past three years, National Grid has been warning that the UK’s energy generation margin has been extremely tight.  With each passing year, the risk of the lights going out has been growing.  This winter (2015/16) saw the margin between what we generate and what we consume fall to …

One of the ways you know that you are dealing with a religion is when the priests reject evidence because it conflicts with the model of how the world is meant to be.  Indeed, history is littered with the corpses of apostates, blasphemers and heretics who had the temerity to …

The G20 meeting in Shanghai has started with a round of finger pointing as it becomes clear that the policies put in place in the wake of the 2008 banking crash have failed to deliver the promised global economic growth. With the International Monetary Fund sounding alarm bells about the …

Have you noticed how France is starved for space these days?  Every field, parking lot and rooftop is now festooned with arrays of solar panels generating sufficient green energy to easily meet Europe’s climate change targets.  I assume that is the situation anyway, since that is the only logical explanation …

One of humanity’s greatest failings is that we take someone who is accomplished in one field and assume that they are competent in all fields.  It is in this light that we should, perhaps, view Bill Gates’ claims that we will see a clean energy breakthrough in the next 15 …

Shares falling, CEOs taking huge bonuses, fears about bad debt and cascading bank failures, and senior bankers coming out to tell us (“trust me, I’m a banker”) that they do not have liquidity problems… it’s 2008 all over again.  And the UK banks have been taking liberties recently according to the …

Climate change is causing key species of fish to migrate out of tropical waters toward Polar Regions according to a study published in Nature Climate Change. The study by researchers from Rutgers University, Princeton University, Yale University and Arizona State University raises concerns that the impact of these migrations will …

French energy giant EDF has called for a radical shake up of the European Union energy market in order to increase generating capacity and to facilitate the transition to low-carbon energy. The current EU energy market was set up to encourage competition between suppliers to keep consumer prices low.  However, …

Oil prices fell yesterday after Abdalla El-Badri, secretary-general of OPEC and Ali al-Naimi, Saudi Arabian oil minister effectively ruled out curbs in supply.  However, Ali al-Naimi’s comment that Saudi Arabia can live with an oil price as low as $20 per barrel has been treated with some scepticism. While it is …