Concern over the steep rise in the price of electricity this winter has paved the way for rehashing the old misinformation about the relative cost of generation.  So it is that Carbon Tracker – a non-profit which seeks to focus financial investment on non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies (NRREHTs) – reports …

Since the 2008 crash, we’ve all had to get used to “shrinkflation” – where, at least until recently, manufacturers kept prices down by shrinking the content.  A 150 gram bar of chocolate, for example, would become a 125 gram bar but would sell at the same price.  Okay, that’s easy …

The problem with trying to assess British politics over the past four months is that, despite my earlier error, Liz Truss turned out to be such a useless politician even by today’s low standards.  While her rapid rise from student activist to prime minister suggested a degree of Machiavellian cunning, …

In 2002, I was invited to the inaugural meeting of the Health and Wellbeing Council for Wales.  At the meeting, two esteemed academics – Peter Townsend and Derek Wanless – presented papers on the future of health and social care in Wales.  Their reports were stark.  Wales had, for many …

Among the biggest human failings is our inability to process time.  Psychologists, for example, have demonstrated time and again that most of us are incapable of deferring gratification.  But our hear-now orientation also leaves us vulnerable to negative events, even when we are forewarned.  One reason, for example, why panic …

As several people have said, making predictions is risky – especially about the future.  Nevertheless, based on what has unfolded in recent years, it is possible to discern trends which point to some likely events in the coming year.  With this in mind, let me make a few tentative predictions …

We are saved Just as Europe is succumbing to yet another self-inflicted energy crisis, news comes of a “major breakthrough” in the quest for the Holy Grail of zero-carbon energy, nuclear fusion.  Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had, apparently, generated an energy return – EROI – of 0.4MJ …

I had not heard of Bill Bullen until he appeared in the media earlier this month.  And so, I take his concern for Britain’s poor at face value: “More than 2 million of Britain’s most vulnerable households, facing the prospect of out-of-reach prices for gas and electricity, could shiver in …

An absence of cleverness Although mainstream, neoclassical economists deny that there is any objective, material source of value, it is remarkable how many tacitly accept David Ricardo’s labour theory of value.  This is the – largely erroneous – belief that it is human labour which generates value within the economy.  …

Some of my readers who read my August post, Nobody could have seen it coming, will have gone on to revisit the 2004 BBC docudrama, If… the lights go out.  Those who made it to the end, will have noticed something odd and unexplained… how, exactly, did everything go back …