Energy

I love Suffolk. This Christmas I will be there with my family and we’ll almost certainly walk up the coast, joining dog-walkers, bird-watchers, hikers and even swimmers in one of the most beautiful and unspoiled parts of the UK. The secret of Suffolk is its relative inaccessibility. No major motorway connects it and once you arrive you’re committed to a sprawling network of country lanes that twist through heathland and grazing marsh, mudflats and reedbeds. Minsmere, a nature reserve that’s home to 6,000 wildlife species, is among its glories. The nightjar, the woodlark, the Dartford warbler and the silver-studded butterfly are just some of the rare species found there. At

Aviation, nuclear power and public transport — along with good restaurants, golden retrievers and hand-knitted bed socks — are, as Julie Andrews put it, a few of my favourite things. So in a week when the news is as depressing as I can remember since the dark winter of 1973-4, I might as well write about all of them. I’ll try to find points of light along the way but it’s not going to be easy. First the plight of airlines, now so extreme that it’s hard to foresee any outcome other than nationalisation for many major carriers. Even if the new ban on leisure travel ends, only pre-flight Covid

What a triumph of entrepreneurial empire-building — if that’s still an acceptable phrase — is the £6.8 billion acquisition of the Asda supermarket chain by Blackburn-born self-made billionaires Mohsin and Zuber Issa. Sons of Gujarati immigrants, these brothers have advanced from a single petrol station in Bury to a chain of almost 6,000 in ten countries with convenience stores and coffee shops attached. Now their company EG Group has brought Asda back into British ownership after two decades as part of Walmart, the big-box monster of American shopping. The pair’s success has been built on boosting the profitability of fuel retailing, in an era when big oil companies were pulling

All logic suggests that the 14-day quarantine for arrivals from abroad really is, as Michael O’Leary of Ryanair put it, ‘a political stunt’. The best explanation is that it was conceived in Downing Street — with minimal consultation, unless someone rang Armando Iannucci, writer of The Thick of It — as a sop to focus-group xenophobia and parental anxiety, as well as a show of grip after the Dominic Cummings debacle. Its absurdity is highlighted by news that the West Indies cricket squad is now quarantined, while 122 high-goal polo players were reported to have beaten the deadline by slipping in last Saturday on a charter flight from Buenos Aires

This year’s Nobel Prize for the silliest piece of scientific research must go to something called the Climate Accountability Institute, for revealing to the world that 35 per cent of all global carbon and methane emissions since 1965 can be traced to just 20 global companies. This week they were named and shamed in the Guardian and revealed to be, er, 17 oil companies and three coal mining companies. Scandalously, they have been pumping all this carbon into the air for their own self-enrichment while the rest of us suffer. As Professor Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University – the fellow behind the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph – puts it:

The list of business leaders who have damaged their careers with a single word famously begins with Gerald Ratner, who wiped half a billion off the value of his jewellery chain in 1991 by describing one of its offerings as ‘crap’. Then there was Bank of England deputy governor Ben Broadbent, whose chance of succeeding Mark Carney plunged after he picked ‘meno-pausal’ to describe an economy past its productive peak. Now Standard Chartered chief executive Bill Winters has blighted his remaining time in post by telling shareholders they were ‘immature’ to have voted against his massive pay package. Having built his career with JP Morgan before joining Standard Chartered in

The world’s poor are, as we know, suffering under the yoke of capitalism, getting ever poorer as we rich grab an ever-greater share of the world’s resources and pollute the environment for everyone else. We know this because the Left keeps telling us so. But amidst the unrelenting gloom of an ever-more unequal world, one might think there would be a little room for reporting the odd piece of positive news. Yet it is not easy to find. One thing you probably haven’t seen this week are the latest statistics from the International Energy Authority (IEA) which show that the number of people without access to an electricity supply in

Gavin Williamson’s warning that the Russian Bear is sizing up the UK’s energy infrastructure is important as it brings long overdue attention to a troubling drift in UK energy policy. Britain’s electricity market is increasingly slanted in favour of importing more electricity from Europe and against securing investment in new power plants at home. Billions of pounds of domestic energy plant investment have consequently been put at risk, which will undermine the future security of supply and risk price rises. It is important to appreciate our growing reliance on imported electricity, as well as the fact that current planning will quadruple this dependency with consequences for prices, competition and security

‘I just want to say one word to you, just one word. Are you listening? Plastics.’ That iconic punch line from The Graduate, when a businessman gives Dustin Hoffman career advice at a cocktail party, has been circling my head ever since China announced that, as of 2018, it will no longer act as the West’s giant blue wheelie bin. Back in 1968, that businessman was righter than he could have known: ‘There’s a great future in plastics.’ We’re in that future — with dire consequences for aquatic life. Let’s review: what is recycling for? To reduce landfill, whose toxins can leach into groundwater. To diminish litter. To create a

Is the only reason Dry January is so popular because people tend to drink a little too much over the festive period? Or is part of it down to wanting to save money after spending too much on overly pricey last-minute Christmas presents? I wouldn’t be surprised if it were more due to financial reasons than health ones – though I can’t be certain. If much of it is down to money woes, then the news that household bills increased by 13% in 2017 compared to the previous years probably won’t make you feel much better. There are all kinds of factors involved in this statistic, but energy bills play

Yesterday, Ross Clark argued over on Coffee House that the government’s Clean Growth Strategy – that is, a promise to insulate a million of the leakiest homes with the aid of £3.6 billion raised through the Energy Company Obligation (aka, a levy on all energy customers’ bills) – was a dubious government target. The strategy, while well-meaning in theory, is never going to work, he argues. Many would argue that another government strategy – that is, the push to install smart meters in our homes – is similarly dubious. Having said that, it’s all very well offering the new technology to people (though there have been reports of energy companies ‘bullying’

The ‘smart meter revolution’ is well and truly upon us, thanks mainly to a government campaign urging us all to have one installed in our homes. The £11bn campaign requires all energy suppliers to offer households a smart meter – which, in theory, should allow people to see exactly how much energy their house is using, and send meter readings to your energy supplier automatically – by 2020, or risk facing fines. With smart meters being offered for ‘free’ by energy suppliers, and the adverts sounding so appealing (after all, who wants to let ‘Gaz and Leccy’, as they’ve been coined in the publicity campaign, run wild in their home?),

The price of offshore wind power has halved, making those giant inshore turbine arrays we love to hate look competitive with new nuclear power for the first time. The headline number in this story is £57.50, which is the guaranteed electricity price per megawatt hour bid by two windfarm ventures in the government’s latest ‘contracts for difference’ subsidy auction. Both due for first delivery in 2022-23, these projects at Hornsea on the East Yorkshire coast and Moray East off the north of Scotland, are between them theoretically capable of powering 2.4 million homes. Just two years ago, windfarms were bidding up to £120 per megawatt hour in comparable auctions; their