Record Carbon Dioxide Emissions from Energy in 2010

The big news of the month of May came at its very end. The International Energy Agency estimates that carbon dioxide emissions due to energy – heat and electricity – rose to a record level in 2010. In 2009 emissions from these sources fell, due to the financial crisis, but since the recovery emissions are [...]

Nuclear Power to end in Germany

Some countries have no nuclear power stations but want them. We are told that these countries cannot be trusted with nuclear power, because they might use nuclear power to build nuclear weapons, so we oppose their acquisition of nuclear power on self invented ethical grounds. Some countries have nuclear power stations and nuclear weapons and [...]

Bombing Libya

A number of nations under the NATO umbrella, mainly the United Kingdom and France, supported by the United States of America, are conducting a bombing campaign in Libya, ostensibly to protect Libyan civilians against the excesses of the present Libyan government. The bombing is authorised by a UN resolution authorising all necessary measures. The Libyan [...]

The environmental cost of wasting food

The amount of food that is wasted each year in the developed world is massive. We waste food in two ways; sometimes by over eating, which is not only a waste of food but a waste of our precious health, and by throwing away food that we have bought but do not wish to eat, [...]

Taxing flying

A UK low cost airline, Easyjet has commissioned a report by Frontier Economics to reveal the impact of the government’s proposed Air Passenger Duty on air travel. The government has offered a number of options for calculating air passenger duty but Frontier Economics’ research indicates that all of the options that would be “bad for [...]

Reporting of Emissions by UK Companies

In April next year the UK will introduce (I expect) mandatory reporting of emissions for large companies. The government has not yet decided which large companies should be obliged to report their emissions; it may be those listed on the stock exchange (about a thousand companies), it may be those using more than 6,000 megawatts [...]

When the law makes things worse

When you get into a hole it is a good idea to stop digging, and that is something that the rich and famous would do well to bear in mind, especially when it comes to super injunction designed to make the hole in which you are digging invisible. It sometimes works and injunctions serve a [...]

The Australian Climate Commission’s Report

I was surprised to read in one of the Sunday newspapers an attack on Chris Huhne, the UK Energy and Climate Change secretary, for wasting money and damaging business by various climate change measures, now, as the papers alleged, the science of climate change had been discredited. I am sure that people may want to [...]

Law, injunctions and injustice

A function of law is to do justice, which can be hard to define but easy to recognise. I have been thinking about the conflict between the rule of law and the right to free speech and the “super” injunctions granted to such unworthy recipients as Fred Goodwin and Andrew Marr. The more I read [...]

Photovoltaic feed in tariffs

Throughout the developed world there are incentives for installing solar photovoltaic panels, which produce electricity in daylight hours. Almost all the incentives are “feed in tariffs”. The installation is usually hooked to the grid and the electricity fed in to the grid. Mostly the gird users do use the electricity but photovoltaic panels do not [...]