Energy

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 …

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 …

There is something deeply tragic about watching people who would be dead within a fortnight without oil nevertheless calling for oil – and fossil fuels more broadly – to be banned immediately.  It is possible, of course, that these people believe that food grows inside supermarkets or that the chemicals …

It takes a special kind of cynical self-interest to make people pay twice for something they already cannot afford, while claiming you are doing them a favour.  This though, is the energy price relief package announced by Liz Truss yesterday.  The package plays that old political card of being not …

There is a deep irony that Europe’s wind turbine factories were among the first to close in the face of our growing energy crisis.  Nevertheless, it goes a long way to demonstrating the fundamental flaw in the net zero project – while the harvested energy of the wind may be …

Eighteen months ago, the UK average annual combined gas and electricity bill was £1,287.  Later this week, we expect to learn that it will rise to £3,582 in October and to £4,266 in January 2023.  Not, in reality, that anybody is going to pay that amount.  All but those at …

Germany is in trouble.  The IMF has revised its projected growth figures down to just 1.2 percent for 2022.  Even this may prove to be optimistic now that gas imports from Russia have dropped to just 20 percent of what was anticipated prior to the EU sanctions.  With autumn approaching, …

Let’s talk about “value.”  Value, at its simplest, is merely the consequences of acting upon the world in a manner which “improves” (some might say despoils) some part of it.  If, for example, someone takes a pile of timber, a saw and some glue and nails, and then turns it …

There is a story, attributed to Richard Buckminster Fuller, which uses the development of bridges as an example of technological progress.  The story begins with two groups of humans separated by a large ravine.  They can shout across to each other, and they soon come to understand each other’s language.  …