Government energy policy has been called into question in a new report from the Institute of Mechanical Engineers. Recent government policy changes have done a great deal to lower energy supply.  With the North Sea gas fields in terminal decline, the UK already imports, more than 40 percent of its …

People hit by flooding in the north of England and in southern Scotland in December 2015 don’t need to be told that “1 in 100 year floods” seem to be happening a lot more often these days.  Coming just two years after a similar series of storms flooded swathes of …

There has never been a state handout that the Tories didn’t love… except of course those that favour the poor.  This is why, among the raft of cuts to benefits and public services that are forcing the most vulnerable into penury, they cut the “Green Deal” that aimed both to …

2016 started badly for what remains of British industry with another round of steel closures and a collapse in North Sea oil and gas industry. In the days before we adopted the neoclassical religion, and had politicians who understood the meaning of the term “strategic resource”, the state would have …

A report by Ceres consultancy and Bloomberg New Energy Finance has found that $12.5 trillion of investment – 75 percent more than envisaged in the COP21 agreement – will be needed to meet the proposed emissions targets. With global government debt currently running at more than $57 trillion, and private …

You won’t have seen this widely reported in mainstream media, but leading UK businesses have expressed growing alarm about the insanity of a government energy policy based almost entirely on the hope (it is no more than that) that it will be possible to produce more than a few months’ supply …

As a young man I occasionally haunted the Great Western Hotel, located next to Cardiff Central railway station.  At that time, the walls of the back bar were adorned with photographs of old Cardiff.  Among these photographs was an image of Cardiff Bay just before the outbreak of the First …

Could 2016 be the year when the unsustainable global asset and debt bubble finally goes public?  If the years following the Global Financial Meltdown of 2008 are true to form, we may well be about to enter the “public” or “bigger fool than me” stage in the economic cycle. Geographer …

The ubiquitous brown envelope stuffed with cash exchanged for favours comes to mind when we think about corruption.  We might think of companies bribing government officials in order to win lucrative contracts.  We might think of bankers being generously rewarded for market rigging.  We might remember occasions where politicians were …