Tim Worstall

This new political geography has been obvious ever since the Copenhagen talks collapsed in 2009, but last week the speed with which ground is being lost became sickeningly obvious. The European parliament refused to back a stop-gap measure to save the European carbon emissions trading scheme. This allows EU companies economising on carbon to sell [...]

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And this is reinforced by recent findings that emissions of soot, or black carbon – which patient readers may remember I have been banging on about for years – are causing twice as much warming as previously estimated, meaning that the contribution of CO2 must be correspondingly less. Yes…. So while governments must urgently adopt [...]

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Sickness being attributed to wind turbines is more likely to have been caused by people getting alarmed at the health warnings circulated by activists, an Australian study has found. Because of course we take mental health seriously now, don’t we?

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Clathrates, or methane hydrates. And Japan seems to have worked out how to drill and extract from them. The state-owned oil and gas company JOGMEC said an exploration ship had successfully drilled 300 metres below the seabed into deposits of methane hydrate, an ice-like solid that stores gas molecules but requires great skill to extract [...]

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One reason Britain has gone so far down the green path is that politicians have not been honest about its economic implications. During the passage of the Climate Change Act in 2008, which commits Britain to cutting net carbon emissions by at least 80 per cent by 2050, the energy minister Phil Woolas rejected his [...]

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Gargantuan sums of money, yes. But then so are the promises being doled out to renewables. What’s really interesting though is the form: Under the proposed funding system, called contracts for difference, companies such as EDF that build and operate nuclear reactors would be guaranteed a minimum “strike” price for the energy they generate. If [...]

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The renewables sector in Germany is significant, already providing 25% of electricity and resulting in lower market prices. Hmm. Domestic ‘leccie in German costs 0.2598 per unit. In the UK it’s 0.1547. 60% higher is an interesting definition of lower isn’t it? Second, is there really no hope of tackling climate change without nuclear power? [...]

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This climate sensitivity thing. Lewis, Annan etc. It reminds me of something and I just cannot remember where I first saw it.Can’t even remember which number it was about. But the general argument went that if a scientific number gets estimated (any number, distance of the Moon, Plank’s Constant, whatever) and the original estimate is [...]

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Scrapping the controversial tax, which applies to all passengers flying from a UK airport, would deliver a 0.45pc boost to GDP within 12 months and could generate 60,000 jobs by 2020, according to a report commissioned by British Airways, easyJet, Ryanair and Virgin Atlantic. APD adds £13 to the cost of a short-haul flight, up [...]

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As I’ve been saying for years now: The Office of Fair Trading today published a report concluding that the reason petrol prices have risen so high is due to fast-rising taxes and higher oil prices. If the Stern Review’s carbon tax had been implemented that would have meant around 11 p on a litre ($80 [...]

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Households will have to pay hundreds of pounds more to insulate their homes if Britain loses a legal battle over VAT with Brussels. The row threatens to further undermine the Government’s “Green Deal” energy efficiency programme, which ministers have billed as the biggest home improvement project since the Second World War. Many energy-saving measures are [...]

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What a clever idea this is: Ministers have been urged to consider banning the import of woodchip made from ash as part of measures to prevent the spread of ash dieback disease. Given that the disease is now endemic not really going to achieve much. Except of course accelerating the day when the lights go [...]

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The crucial question has always been: what is climate sensitivity? How much warming do we get for a doubling of greenhouse gases? Matt Ridley tells that it might be a lot less than currently thought: In short: We can now estimate, based on observations, how sensitive the temperature is to carbon dioxide. We do not [...]

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Household energy bills will be about £600 higher per year by the end of the decade if the UK relies increasingly on gas, the government’s climate advisers warned on Thursday. But the Committee on Climate Change found that bills would only be £100 higher than today’s average dual fuel bill of about £1,300, if the [...]

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The column today. Shale gas, well, we don’t know whether it will work, whether it will maker a profit. All very difficult. OK, it is. And you know how we work these things out? We go and do them and find out whether they do work or make a profit. Then there is the huge [...]

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Humankind’s greatest crisis coincides with the rise of an ideology that makes it impossible to address. By the late 1980s, when it became clear that man-made climate change endangered the living planet and its people, the world was in the grip of an extreme political doctrine whose tenets forbid the kind of intervention required to [...]

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Seems most odd: Turning the human body into a power station sounds like a zany plotline from the Matrix movies, but scientists are starting to take seriously the idea that one way to stem climate change might be to harvest tiny amounts of energy in the form of the body’s heat, movement, metabolism and vibrations. [...]

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The research, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, used the latest satellite technology to measure sea level rise It found that sea levels have been rising by 3.2mm per year for the last 30 years, rather than the 2mm previously calculated. If the trend continues then sea levels could be rising by 9mm per [...]

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The world’s largest oil-exporting countries have been asked to consider imposing a small carbon tax on oil as a way to break the deadlock over finance for poorer countries in the UN climate talks. The Ecuador-led initiative, submitted to the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec), could see a 3-5% tax levied on every barrel [...]

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This seriously astonishes me. Just a little bit of background. So, we’ve two things we want to know about climate change. 1) What are the effects of emissions? 2) How many emissions will there be? Obviously, we can get more complex than that but that’s the basic couple of questions at the root of it [...]

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