Energy

One reason why nationalist populists like Trump are able to get away with calling mainstream media “enemies of the people” is that those outlets all too often fabricate stories.  This has more to do with falling advertising revenues and increased competition for people’s attention than with grand conspiracy (although that, …

With the world’s great and good flying off to Davos to lecture the rest of us on lowering our carbon footprints, everyone from tech companies to hedge funds is suddenly keen to go “carbon neutral.”  Could it be that hard-headed billionaires have had their hearts melted by Greta Thunberg’s pleas? …

It’s the 20th January and southern Britain is experiencing its first full week of winter weather.  Other than a brief cold snap at the beginning of December, the winter has been unusually warm and wet – a consequence of living in the path of the Gulf Stream in a changing …

On balmy summer days in medieval times, the miller could often be seen lounging in the shade while the villagers toiled in the fields.  The miller, it seemed, had a cushy deal.  Not only did he get to relax on hot summer days, but he took a percentage of all …

The 2020s began with the usual round of happy-clappy greenwash about so-called “green energy.”  Typical was Julia Kollewe’s New Year’s Day Guardian piece proclaiming that “Zero-carbon electricity outstrips fossil fuels in Britain across 2019:” “Following a dramatic decline in coal-fired power and a rise in renewable and low-carbon energy, 2019 …

The development of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) for computing has served to lull a generation into believing a fantastical version of what economists call “substitutability.”  According to the economists, when the supply of any input to the economy dries up, “market forces” will cause another input to take its …

It is fairly common these days to come across somebody on social media who thinks that leaving the freezer door open or running the air conditioner outside might provide us with a means of halting global warming.  And while engineers and physicists might be tempted to laugh at the suggestion, …

In early August, American essayist John Michael Greer made the prediction that climate activism was about to lose a great deal of its lustre: “Well, it’s about to happen all over again. I’ve been wondering how soon a certain marriage of convenience in contemporary cultural politics would come messily apart, …

It is rare for the entire spectrum of the British press to agree on something.  But a couple of weeks ago they all agreed that fracking had been banned in the UK.  Pro-fracking outlets like the Telegraph and the Daily Mail reported the news as an unconscionable government cave-in.  Meanwhile …

Throughout history it has fallen to poets and artists rather than scientists and economists – still less politicians and journalists – to present the true nature of the human condition.  With this in mind, I wondered if there might have been a popular song that sums up our current human …