Investing in the Future of Energy

Brent Crude Oil is today selling at more than $115 a barrel. Its price has risen by 9% in the past month and that price rise has largely gone unnoticed because the world financial farce has dominated the media. Whatever you think of the economy the availability of fuel and energy is important to it. [...]

Time to write off debts

The pattern is now becoming obvious. First banks make loans available to nations at cheap rates of interest. The nations borrow more than they can prudently afford to repay. They expect to repay the loans out of economic growth. Gradually and one by one the nations find it difficult to repay the loans. Other nations [...]

A Scandal in the Pipeline

As news of a gas pipeline being completed under the Baltic to bring gas from Russia to Europe breaks, in the other part of the Northern Hemisphere news of a scandal comes, about another pipeline, this time bearing oil. This is the Keystone XL, which carries oil taken from Canada’s oil tar sands and which [...]

Trying to fix the unfixable

Over the past few weeks governments have been grappling with the financial crisis in the Eurozone. Governments can only justify their existence if their rationale is to protect the people they govern and ensure that those people are safe, free and can pursue their dreams. The problems of the euro, with Greece, Italy, Spain and [...]

I remember the 5th of November

Fifty years ago Guy Fawkes Night – on the fifth of November – was something we celebrated every year. In Poplar, opposite where I lived, was a bob site. It was a rectangle of land which some bomb had hit and left broken bricks and mortar, broken glass and debris. In summer the place was [...]

Time for the Greek people to say Οχι once again

What is being called the Greek Crisis seems to have more twists and turns than a game of snakes and ladders. In a matter of days the leaders of the euro zone are tuning somersaults in their positions. As I write these words I do not know whether Greece will or will not have a [...]

Climate Change and World Population

I think it was Peter Cook and Dudley Moore who told us, back in the 1960s, that if all the chinese were to link hands they would girdle the earth three times – girdle, girdle, girdle. 

Fracking Dangerous

If you are a lawyer acting for someone buying a house in an area where there has been mining, one of the searches that you must make is a mining search, which will help you be able to advise your client whether there are any issues like settlement or compensation that the previous mine workings [...]

The Reduction in the Feed In Tariff for Household Renewable Electricity

It is good to see that governments incentivise renewable energy, particularly microgeneration. Whatever your views on anthropogenic climate change clean renewable energy is healthier and gives a better degree of energy security for nations, businesses and individuals and enables our fossil fuels, which are finite and are being gobbled up with increasing appetite by a [...]

Answering Questions on the Renewable Heat Incentive

The long awaited, long overdue Renewable Heat Incentive finally looks as though it will be launched. The Department of Energy and Climate Change Minsiter, Greg Barker and I have been having some indirect correspondence through my MP, Mike Freer, in an effort to persuade DECC to get their act together and get the RHI up [...]