We are using failed strategies to fight climate change

Now that we are in the middle of a banking crisis the environment and climate change has been largely ignored while we ponder on whether the steps being taken around the world will prevent the world’s economy from falling into a long period of depression. Will the policies that we are using to fight climate [...]

Who supplies energy to the United Kingdom

Who supplies the energy of the United Kingdom? Energy is so important, and a bit like money, not for its own sake but because of the uses to which we put it. Households, organisations and businesses need energy to heat their premises and water, to power their appliances and machinery, to cook food and to [...]

Brazil and its forests which serve us all

Step by step, and taking very small steps, Brazil is planning to end its practice of permitting more trees to be cut down than are grown each year, and it plans so to do by 2015. Brazil will be trying to end illegal logging and consult on a national plan how its forests should be [...]

Perfidious Albion and climate change

Targets, measured in expected outcomes, rather than actual measures are the world’s favourite way to attempt to slow down the pace of climate change, and the targets are different in different parts of the world. The world’s most populous fastest growing nations have virtually no targets, and the world’s less populous but highly developed countries [...]

All coal is dirty

There is no such thing as clean coal, but Gordon Brown does not seem to know that. He talked about clean coal in his recent speech to the Labour Party Conference in Manchester, as though it existed and the conference members cheered and applauded him. It is a bit like the Government’s zero Carbon Homes [...]

North of the chemical equator

If you live in the northern hemisphere, and most people do, you will be breathing a different and poorer quality of air than if you live in the southern hemisphere. Researchers from the University of York have found that roughly coincident with the equator (but not completely) there is another imaginary line – a chemical [...]

Cap and Trade emissions schemes will not save the planet from climate change

Virtually every Government and economists embraces the concept of “cap and trade” as the best way of reducing climate changing greenhouse gases emissions and the cheapest way of avoiding emissions. Governments (and economists) do not usually find the cheapest way of doing something. If they did I expect our taxes would be lower.

Corporate Climate Change leaders provide poor advice

The United Kingdom Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change is a body sponsored by the Price of Wales and they are concerned with climate change.  They believe that there is an urgent need to establish new and long term strategies for dealing with climate change. They are right. There is such a need. These “leaders” [...]

How plants become net emitters of carbon dioxide

The Desert Research Institute is a highly active body that has been trying to understand, amongst other things, what happens to plants when we get unusually hot weather. Plants are, of course, an important way in which carbon dioxide is extracted from the air, which the plants use in the process of photosynthesis to enable [...]

Economic growth and a steady state for the planet

Several years ago Mr Czech kindly wrote a short review of “the Energy Age”. I asked him to do this because in the course of my research I thought about economic growth and reached the view that economic growth is what everyone aspires to, but the aspiration is misguided. We have to go beyond the [...]