Renewable energy: a prize for the Minister who actually answers questions

Last week in Parliament the Secretary of State for Energy & Climate Change was asked how the £5.8 billion that the Government would spend on renewable energy over the three years ended April 2011 was broken down. 
It was a good question, asked by Greg Clark for two reasons;

Greenhouse gas emission statistics

When we talk about greenhouse gas emissions we do not always understand which greenhouse gases are most important and the sources of emissions. The following information comes from the World Resources Institute

Governments will not make hard decisions to protect the climate at Copenhagen

You will see headlines and hear news items to the effect that there is only so many days (just over a month now) to get a climate protection “deal” at Copenhagen. There the nations of the world will meet in order to try and reach agreement as to the best way to protect the climate [...]

The European Union’s budgetary limit and conditional limit on climate protection

The European Union has announced that the world must spend a hundred billion Euros a year on climate change, and that the EU would pay its fair share subject to the proviso that other nations would do likewise.  It is a bit like a thief promising to stop stealing if all the other thieves stop [...]

Is the Green Fiscal Commission a waste of time and money?

One of the four principles of energy use that I set out in the Energy Age was that polluters should pay. In terms of energy use the pollution that energy creates as its by-product is devastating and in the case of emissions of greenhouse gas which causes climate change the effects might be so overwhelming [...]

Signing up to targets at Copenhagen will be meaningless

As the world’s nations prepare to negotiate at Copenhagen in December the specific negotiators will be concentrating on targets. Each major nation will have a different idea about which target is right for it, and each small nation will have more ambitious targets than each large nation.I expect that at the end of the negotiations [...]

Professor’s MacKay’s nuclear vision

It is difficult for a nation to plan its energy requirements for the future and that difficulty is made harder when that nation cannot decide upon a settled energy policy. In the United Kingdom there are so many conflicting policy proposals that I despair of the United Kingdom ever establishing an energy policy which secures [...]

Energy Perfomance Certificates – measuring the wrong things!

Energy Performance Certificates are part of Home Information packs and perhaps they were the rationale for Home Information Packs. The idea was to build a database of the energy performance of homes across the United Kingdom so that at some stage, no doubt when it was too late a cynic would argue, the government could [...]

Electric cars – part of the solution

In China there are plans to launch a new electric car which can hold five passengers and travel 250 miles on a single charge. It also might be fully charged in an hour. If the claims are justified the E6 will transform the automotive market and the technology I am sure will be adopted by [...]

Climate change migration

Dr Cecilia Tacoli, a researcher at the International Institute of Environment and Development, has published a paper in which she holds that there are misconceptions and alarmism about the effect of climate change on population movements. She thinks that many of us overestimate the likely population migrations because we do not understand how mass migration [...]