The newest member of the US Federal Reserve Bank, former Goldman Sachs executive Neel Kashkari, claims that the issues revealed in 2008 have still not been resolved.  According to Kashkari, measures that were taken in the immediate aftermath of the crash were necessarily conservative given the weakness of the economy. …

Nuclear power operator EDF is to extend the operational lives of four of its UK nuclear power stations.  Heysham 1 and Hartlepool will continue to operate until 2024, while Heysham 2 and Torness will run until at least 2030. The reasons for the extension are threefold.  First, inspection of the …

Louis XV of France is reported to have presciently said, “After me the deluge…”  That awareness that things could not go on as they had been was lost on Louis XVI, whose court behaved as if the real France was not falling apart around them.  It was only the appointment …

Often seen as irrelevant to global food needs, and dismissed as a middle class fad, organic farming could be our best hope for feeding 7.5 billion people on a planet increasingly plagued by droughts.  That’s the finding of a new study by John Reganold and Jonathan M. Wachter from Washington …

Charles Hendry, who served as Minister of State for energy between 2010 and 2012, has hit out at complacency over the decline of North Sea gas production and the UK’s increasing dependence upon imported gas from Russia and the Middle East. In 2012, disrupted supply from Russia to Ukraine had …

Launching the 2016 World Energy Outlook at a conference in London, BP CEO Bob Dudley has warned world leaders that despite targets set at COP21 in Paris, the world is on course for a dangerous increase in temperature: “The growth rate of carbon emissions over the period of the Outlook is …

The University of Reading has published research showing the flights from London to the USA will be getting longer – and costing more – as a result of climate change: “Aircraft do not fly through a vacuum, but through an atmosphere whose meteorological characteristics are changing because of global warming. …

New research from the Carbon Trust has found that public sector bodies are largely unprepared for the impact of climate change. With climate scientists warning that the frequency of a broad range of high-impact weather events such as floods and droughts, public services may struggle to continue operating for prolonged …

Despite the recent cheerleading from Ben Broadbent, the prolonged fall in the price of oil is bad for the UK economy.  This is because – like most economists – Broadbent misunderstands the economic fundamentals. The accepted wisdom is that low oil prices are the equivalent of a tax cut for …

We have been encouraged to plant trees as a way of offsetting carbon emissions.  But when it comes to climate change, some species of trees are considerably worse than others.  That’s the finding of new research led by Dr Kim Naudts at the Laboratory of Climate Science and Environment in …