Energy

It’s that time of year again, time for the world to pay attention to climate change policy for a few weeks.  Most of the year, schemes like the EU Emissions Trading System and the Renewables Obligation just wallow in dysfunction and quietly cost us a fortune, adding to our electricity bills in particular.  Manufacturers pay attention, and higher energy costs threaten to drive industrial jobs abroad, and the poor and elderly feel the effects, even if they don’t know why their bills are rising.  But the only people who really have the staff and the organisational clout to pursue this issue all year round are the environmental campaigns.   Many

Honesty is an attractive though rare quality in a politician, and Alistair Darling’s self-awareness and morose delivery always grabs attention. Last night, the former chancellor told a conference of bankers that the 50 percent levy on bonuses over £25,000 was a failure. The FT reports him saying: ‘I think it will be a one-off thing because, frankly, the very people you are after here are very good at getting out of these things and . . . will find all sorts of imaginative ways of avoiding it in the future… what I wanted to do was send a message to them that we all live in the same world together.’

Today marks the 31st anniversary of President Jimmy Carter’s famous ‘malaise’ speech. On July 15, 1979, Carter, then running for re-election against Ronald Reagan, ignored the advice of his campaign team and gave Americans a grave warning. The nation, he said, was facing a fundamental “crisis of confidence”. (He didn’t actually use the word malaise.)   “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption,” he said. “Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the

Vince Cable is announcing to Metro that “We do not want to make such deep cuts to transport, energy, science research and universities.” Really? According to whom? The science budget, which has shot from £1.3bn to an indefensible £3.7bn, is a prime example of a cost that should not be borne by the taxpayer. Scientists are best left to get on with this themselves, and companies are more than capable of funding research. On energy, again, there are many expensive vanity projects just begging for the axe. Given that Cable is in charge of the universities brief – the most important part of his otherwise non-job – you can expect

The President of the Maldives can sell his snorkel: he’ll be waving not drowning. The New Scientist carries a fascinating article, examining the research of Paul Kench of the University of Auckland and Arthur Webb of the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission. Using aerial photographs and high-resolution satellite images, Kench and Webb have found that 23 out of 27 low-lying Pacific islands, deemed to be vulnerable to rising sea levels, have grown by up to 10 percent in 40 years. Local sea levels have risen by 120 millimetres over the period. Coral is defying the apocalyptic flooding scenarios. Reef coral surrounding the islands is eroded and deposited to form atolls

Today the TaxPayers’ Alliance is releasing a new report which sets out the huge and excessive burden that green taxes impose on families and business across the UK. At the moment, 14 percent of domestic bill costs are the result of climate change policies.  Increasing the price of energy hits the poor and elderly hardest – which, in turn, increases poverty and benefit dependency.  At the same time, 21 percent of industrial electricity bills are the result of climate change policies.  If we want to make our economy less dependent on financial services, driving up a major part of many manufacturing firms’ costs isn’t the way to do it. Despite