News that supermarkets have been rationing broccoli and iceberg lettuces was met with the usual British stiff upper lip.  But we should ask a few searching questions about why produce that we have taken for granted is suddenly unavailable, and what this might tell us about the resilience of our globalised …

Fracking and chemicals giant Ineos has threatened to sue the National Trust to gain access to the charity’s land for fracking.  According to David Leask at Herald Scotland: “Greenpeace, which campaigns against fracking, yesterday revealed documents showing Ineos Shale, a subsidiary of the Ineos group, has threatened the trust with …

Nine out of the top ten bankruptcies in the USA in 2016 were energy companies, with fracking companies accounting for five out of the ten, according to Jones Day: “With one exception, the Top 10 List of ‘public company’ (defined as a company with publicly traded stock or debt) bankruptcies …

News that Vladimir Putin provides the funding of anti-fracking campaigns will have come as a big surprise to the thousands of volunteers who donate and campaign to prevent what is widely seen as an environmentally and economically destructive industry. In fact, the story says more about the neo-McCarthyism in the USA …

Baroness Helena Kennedy called it “government without wing mirrors.”  It is the practice of passing into law draconian measures that the government of the day claims to be too nice or too sensible to ever use against the people: “It is… vital that any process of modernisation or reform must …

Here’s a spooky little story that just might resonate with this week’s news: In a somewhat obscure spy thriller from 1982 – The Twentieth Day of January – Ted Allbeury tells the story of how in the future the KGB interferes with a US presidential election in order to get …

Oil giant Exxon has broadly accepted the science behind climate change and global warming.  It does not, however, regard the Paris Climate Agreement or any future climate regulations as an impediment to its operations. The simple – and undoubtedly true – reason for this is fundamentally depressing: even concerned environmentalists …

Technological prowess has ushered in a new century of energy independence.  Techniques for recovering the oil found in shale deposits and bitumen sands, for drilling in ultra-deep water and for recovering Arctic oil have allowed the Western states to break free from our dependency on the Middle East and Russia …

Michael Gove’s comment that “we’ve had enough of experts” has come to symbolise everything that was wrong with the Brexit referendum result: A bunch of knuckle dragging, fact-denying, racist proletarians who could barely muster a C grade GCSE between them – swayed by a cynical pack of lies from the …

Celebrating the deployment of just about any renewable energy technology is customary in left-/green-leaning circles… no matter how stupid.  But this speaks more to an uncritical tribal mentality equivalent to that on the climate change denial side of the argument.  It is more about a warm feeling of being on …