Environment

Whether Donald Trump really believes that climate change is merely a Chinese hoax dreamed up to destroy US industry is a matter of conjecture; but his decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement is a fact.  And while some within his administration clearly do think that climate change is a …

Barely a week goes by these days without someone claiming that this or that country ran entirely on renewable energy.  But these claims are more about lulling the population into a false sense of security than any realistic appraisal of either national or global energy use. Even Britain’s recent coal-free …

The Association of British Insurers (ABI) has warned its members to prepare for increasing storm damage to UK properties as global temperatures rise.  A new report conducted for the ABI by AIR Worldwide predicts that global temperature increase of just 1.5oC – which some scientists believe could happen as soon …

Given the number of crowd funding green energy scams that make their way across social media, you would be forgiven for thinking that green technology is in its infancy.  Worryingly, though, there are signs that genuine progress in green technology may be slowing. This, at least, is a concern raised …

News that Britain enjoyed its first coal free day since the start of the industrial revolution was broadly welcomed last week.  But check behind the headlines and it is not clear that the UK really was coal-free after all. Most obviously, industrial users including the UK’s steelworks were still burning coal, …

Back in the days when climate change was far off in the future, small countries like Wales could be used as a measure of the damage humans were doing to the planet.  In the 1980s we were regularly treated to headlines along the lines of “An area of forest the …

American author and occasional politician Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. once famously observed that: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” Nowhere is the truth of this observation more clearly seen than in Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary’s recent dismissal of …

The European Union is considering lowering its energy saving targets after 2021 according to Robert-Jan Bartunek at Reuters: “The text drafted by the Maltese presidency of the European Council proposes new annual energy savings targets of 1.4 percent through 2030, down from 1.5 percent proposed by the European Commission. “A …