Heat Pumps – their pros and cons

The Energy Savings Trust has been testing heat pump performance in 83 homes for the past year. It seems that the EST has reached the conclusion that like the parson’s egg a heat pump is good in parts. Many of the heat pumps made no difference to energy cost or carbon dioxide emission reductions, some [...]

How to prepare your gas boiler for winter

A stitch in time saves nine, an ounce of prevention is better than cure so if you want to keep your boiler working over the winter here are some tips of what you should do now, to save problems later. I shall assume that those reading this are some of the 80% of UK households [...]

Vanity, vanity all is vanity

A picture is usually worth a thousand words, but not in politics. Of course the sight of a flusteredpolitician embarrassed or frightened at being exposed by some deft questioning by a rival or by ajournalist speaks loudly, as a good picture should, but we must never forget that it is the words anddeeds that should [...]

An Energy and Climate Change Minister Speaks

Chris Huhne, UK minister for Energy and Climate Change, recently spoke at the London School of Economics about “Green Growth”. Ministers regard their speech as important statements of policy and intent. How often they turn out as such is a matter of some doubt, but we should have no doubt that when these speeches are [...]

Out of frying pan into the nuclear reactor

According to a UK Channel 4 documentary a billion extra tonnes of carbon (note carbon, not carbon dioxide) has been added to our atmosphere because of “opposition to nuclear energy”. The suspiciously round and memorable figure of one billion tonnes of carbon (not carbon dioxide, folks) has been arrived at by smoke and mirrors. It [...]

Remember remember the fifth of November

On the fifth of November people in England and Wales build bonfires. They do this because four hundred and five years ago today Mr Guy Fawkes and some fellow conspirators tried to blow up the House of Lords. The plot was discovered, Guy Fawkes arrested, tortured and subsequently hung drawn a quartered, the penalty for [...]

Tilting the scales of Justice

Jury trials are an inconvenience. I have been involved, in my younger years, with a number of jury trials as a lawyer, I hasten to add. Now, having not practised criminal law for many years I can step back and judge objectively my experience of jury trials. Generally I think trial by jury favours the [...]

A Green Deal for Home Insulation

The United Kingdom’s coalition government promised to be the greenest ever. A cynic might well argue that such a promise does not mean that the government will be very green; after all it will not take much to surpass the green measures of the last labour government and Mrs Thatcher still remains the person who [...]

Happy Birthday Dear Blog

I started writing these posts on 31st October 2007. The blog, if it is an entity of its own, is now three years with over 1,100 essays which together with the comments must constitute close to a million words of opinion, facts and prejudices. The essays are far from perfect and one day I shall [...]

Making us cowards

What has made us into cowards? Is it the prosperity with which we live and the many possessions which we enjoy? It seems that the way to control people is to frighten them and the greater the fear you can engender the more easily you can control people. I fly quite a lot for my [...]