Energy

These days, the UK government’s Business Secretary, Greg Clarke has the appearance of a man who has stared into the Abyss and seen the impermanence and futility of existence.  Just two years ago, when he was given a business brief that included the old department for energy and climate change, …

When contemporary economists, politicians and journalists proclaimed the imminent arrival of “peak oil demand,” they were hardly espousing a new idea.  In fact, they were merely repeating an idea that was doing the rounds in the 1850s – an idea that was thoroughly debunked. In those days, it was coal …

The arguments for and against fracking have been so rehearsed as to be clichéd.  For its proponents, fracking is an energy miracle that will simultaneously cut energy prices and save us all from climate change.  To its opponents it is an environmentally dangerous practice that will result in pollution, earthquakes …

The problem with the fast-crumbling ideology introduced by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher is that, like ideologies in general, it is very all-or-nothing.  Just as communists see absolutely no place for private ownership in their version of utopia, so the neoliberal dream was of a society consisting solely of marketplaces.  …

Tidal power is one of the great untapped sources of renewable energy.  This is why a proposal to construct a tidal lagoon in Swansea Bay has attracted so much positive publicity.  If successful, the project would merely be the first part of a much larger system of tidal power at …

A United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) report released last month has urged countries outside the USA to be cautious about fracking. In addition to warning about the excessive water consumption and potential for earthquakes, the report highlights the many commercial advantages the US frackers enjoyed that are …

When the trucks stop running, the economy crashes… and it does so rapidly.  That is a lesson that Brazil has reminded us of this week.  But it is a lesson that more developed states like the UK ignore at their peril. Problems began, as is often the case, with a …

The long period of anaemic GDP growth is about to stall.  The reason why?  Because global oil prices have just broken out of their Goldilocks band – the price range in which oil companies can stay in businesses without triggering a global recession. Last week the Brent Crude oil price …

Sometimes a story is repeated so often that its veracity is never challenged.  One such is the myth that British households are in thrall to a wicked energy cartel that puts excessive profits above common decency.  So much so, indeed, that the government and the opposition parties have all signed …

For all practical purposes, solar energy (along with the wind, waves and tides that it drives) is unending.  Or, to put it more starkly, the odds of human beings being around to witness the day when solar energy no longer exists are staggeringly low.  The same, of course, cannot be …