Geoglyphs in Arica

I am writing this in Arica, at the Northern part of Chile. The weather is overcast, which is unusual and rain is predicted for the week end. If the rain comes it will be the first rain that has fallen here in twenty years.

Did peak oil happen in 2008, and did that cause the recession?

According to Professor Peter Newman of Curtin University in Australia peak oil has already occurred. The professor thinks that demand now outstrips supply, or would do so if the global recession had not curtailed the demand for oil significantly. He thinks that oil reached its peak (in terms of supply) when its price peaked at [...]

Planning for earthquakes and tsunami

The world has suffered many natural disasters recently, or so it seems. I do not think that things like earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes and volcanic eruptions are getting more frequent. They are not. However, the footprint of humanity extends into almost every corner of the world these days, so the impact of a natural disaster, in [...]

Australia – doing the right thing for the wrong reason

When I last looked Australia was in per capita terms the most carbon dioxide polluting nation in the world. Its energy is heavily dependent upon coal, which it burns to generate the electricity it uses in great quantities, especially for its air conditioning.  The Australian Government proposed to reduce its emissions with their own version [...]

Clean planet or dirty planet?

Humans have been on this planet long enough to change vast tracts of it and to influence change in almost every region of its surface. Humans have influenced a few miles above the surface of the earth and a few miles below it. The change the crust that they inhabit, and in that crust, the [...]

How much will the seas rise?

In 2007 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that the oceans would rise by between 18 and 59 centimeters by the end of this century. Recently Svetlana Jevrejeva of the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory has come up with much higher projections. She thinks that the sea level rise will be between 60 and 160 centimetres.

The present economy of the United Kingdom

Making sense of the British Economy is hard at the best of times but during an election period where lies lurk in dark corners ready to pounce on the unwary, it is especially hard. There are four key statistics that have come out recently which give a good idea of what is happening and I [...]

Ryanair and Virgin Atlantic want to stick their noses into the taxpayers’ trough

The bigger the business the more taxpayers’ money they think that they are entitled to claim. We have already seen the energy companies get huge amounts of free taxpayers’ money in the form of Emission Trading Credits. Of course the banks received huge amounts of free money because they had lost out in the world [...]

Goldman Sachs – your dedicated financial advisor

The world is slowly beginning to understand that if you allow a key industry or service to be controlled by a handful of enterprises, they will compete against the public interest rather than compete against each other. In the United Kingdom there are a handful of energy companies selling precisely the same products at virtually [...]

Global warming, sunspots and the possibility of another Maunder Minimum

I write this as the volcanoes of Iceland are filling the skies above my head with fine volcanic ash, but those skies are clear and blue, without a single vapour trial in sight. Most of the airspace or Northern Europe has been a no fly zone for more than five days. What is happening in the [...]