Among many other essential reforms, if the UK is to meet its 2050 climate targets it needs to install 4,000 electric vehicle charging points every day. That’s according to Keith Anderson, CEO of Scottish Power. Anderson also called for an equally fantastic effort to replace domestic gas central heating systems …
Read More »A curious lack of imagination
In the late 1970s and early 1980s a former British MI6 agent named Ted Allbeury became a moderate-selling spy fiction writer. Although never ascending to the heights reached by other British ex-spies such as Ian Fleming and John le Carré; Allbeury churned out a series of books with titles such …
Read More »What Extinction Rebellion is getting wrong
In many ways, this month’s Extinction Rebellion protests – which have brought city centres around the world to a standstill – are to be welcomed and supported; not least because they have made a huge contribution to raising public awareness of what they call the “climate emergency” (or what I …
Read More »It became necessary to destroy the party to save it
As the latest feeble attempt at (not) reaching a deal with the EU27 comes to its inevitable conclusion, Prime Minister Johnson will seek to blame everyone but himself for the failure. First among those upon whose head he will cast blame will be the shady “Brussels bureaucrats” who have supposedly …
Read More »Peak oil demand is now
The theory of “peak oil demand” was a techno-utopian response to the supposed debunking of the peak oil theory first set out by M. King Hubbert in the 1950s. Hubbert’s simple observation was that oil fields tend to reach peak production roughly 40 years after they are discovered. Since most …
Read More »System failure
Officially, Britain’s worse power outage in a decade is being recorded as an unusual event that nobody could have reasonable anticipated. Dig a little deeper into the National Grid report on the 9 August 2019 blackout, however, and we discover an electricity system that has been allowed to become increasingly …
Read More »Between anger and bargaining
Last week my local BBC new channel posed the question, could lower speed limits end air pollution? According to the article: “Speed cameras to enforce 50mph limits designed at improving air quality on the M4 and other roads have been activated… “The Welsh Government said the cameras would help deliver …
Read More »The petty crime that kills the Green New Deal
A rise in petty crime has always been an indicator of hard times. Statistically, the poorer people get, the more property-related crime increases. Car thefts are just one of many property crimes that are on the increase just now. As Will Dron at the Sunday Times Driving reported earlier this …
Read More »The Net Energy pincer
Thinking about car ownership in the years before the financial crash, I reasoned that there were two groups of people who fared best. The first were those rich enough to buy brand new cars. Although they lost on the rapid decline in the re-sale cost of the car, the price …
Read More »Yellowhammer: a taste of collapse
The – largely unmentioned – benefit of a no-deal Brexit is that since the neoliberal global economy is declining, Britain might as well get its collapse in early to avoid the rush. That is, as the net energy available to the economy declines because of the remorseless rise in the …
Read More »