Western capitalist economies don’t really do shortages.  There are a few stand alone exceptions such as a music festival or a sporting event, where demand so outstrips supply that queues form.  But for the most part – as we saw last week with the eye-watering rise in wholesale gas prices …

It is of some interest that people have been contrasting images of British petrol queues this weekend with the petrol queues which formed back in 1973 as a result of the OPEC oil embargo.  Not least because a more accurate comparison is with the fuel protests in September 2000.  That …

Believe it or not, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has every right to stand before the nations of the world and lecture them on climate change.  Not that Johnson himself has done much to address the crisis (indeed, given that having children is the single biggest cause of climate change …

Global warming may yet prove to be the one thing which saves us from our largely misguided attempts to respond to global warming.  This is because, while the crisis is real enough, the solution that we have bought into is an absolute stinker.  While a great deal of corporate profit …

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – A well-meaning but not particularly bright left-leaning US politician – made a stir earlier this week by wearing a figure-hugging dress emblazoned with the slogan “Tax the Rich” to the prestigious 2021 Met Gala.  Since the slogan was clearly political, it wasn’t long before the various political …

Perhaps the most contentious – and least asked – question about industrial civilisation concerns its origins.  Why, of all the potential places in the world, should a small group of islands in the northeast Atlantic have emerged as the cradle of industrialisation?  Many possible reasons have been put forward, including: …

There are those who mistake Boris Johnson’s “Bojo the Clown” façade for the man himself.  But nobody gets to rise to the rank of Prime Minister without a degree of cunning and ruthlessness.  Nevertheless, Johnson does stand out as something of a chancer who, thus far at least, has won …

At seven minutes to five on the afternoon of 9 August 2019, a lightening strike caused the loss of 150MW of distributed power (i.e., a large number of small wind, diesel and solar generators) from the National Grid.  This sudden loss triggered the safety system on the giant Hornsea wind …

If an energy policy sounds too good to be true, that is usually because it is.  Take, for example, just one of the jigsaw pieces in current policy for reaching net zero by 2050: electric car batteries.  Jillian Ambrose – who should know better – at the Guardian reports this …