Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the greenest of them all?

The competition seems to be underway for the greenest politicians. It is a bit like a beauty contest and there are plenty of competitors from all over the world. I think I shall try to be the magic mirror and review the contestants.

Deepwater – someone blundered

The failures at the Macondo Well and its rig the Deepwater Horizon will fill tens of thousands of pages of evidence, reports and newsprint. The first in what will, no doubt, be a long line of reports has been BP’s own investigation. I have read the executive summary and watched BP’s video which is at [...]

The non-diamond geezer

I spent my years in school in Poplar, which is in the East End of London, where people regularly used cockney slang in all its subtleties, though not, of course, as school in the presence of the teachers. A diamond geezer signified someone who was dependable and helpful – a good sort and a reliable [...]

Are carbon emissions irrelevant?

The reporting of the highly complex science of climate change seems to be changing. It went through a phase of over simplification and the problem with over simplifying something is that you end up not with science, but with a series of truisms, none of which are true, either in the scientific sense or in [...]

Peak oil and New Best Friends

The concept of peak oil has a history all of its own. It has been adopted, almost as a footnote to the energy and climate change debate, scorned and dismissed. Learned people have argued against it; economists and politicians have ignored the consequences of planning for a time when oil supplies decline in real terms, [...]

London’s traffic and street works

The school holiday period is usually when London’s transport of all types moves most freely. The journey’s of London’s school children criss-cross the capital. Most London children are not educated at their nearest schools, and so in term time children fill the buses, underground and get ferried to schools by their parents in cars.

Blair’s Mein Kampf

Mr Blair has written a biography. I have no intention of buying it. Mr Blair is publicising his book under strict conditions. He will not write a dedication for a reader; I am sure that he does not want to talk or associate with mere mortals. I do not know what the rules are about [...]

Counting the embedded emissions

Virtually everyone in the United States and the European Union knows that mass manufacturing of consumer goods is most cheaply carried out in places like China and India. In the past forty years whole manufacturing industries have been uprooted and moved to poor countries where the wages are very low and where the costs of [...]

The root cause of global warming:population growth

The world’s human population appears to be growing inexorably. We cannot stem it and we cannot stop its relentlessness. Population growth is at the very root of all environmental and climate change problems. The sooner we recognise this, the earlier we shall be able to mitigate climate change. The numbers of humans have more than doubled [...]

What! Energy companies making false representations!

When Mrs Thatcher de-nationalised the electricity and gas suppliers she did so in the hope that energy prices would fall with competition and that the energy companies would be slimmer, trimmer and provide a more efficient service to their customers. Most of the public’s minds were fixed upon the short term effect of denationalisation of [...]