Tim Worstall

From the usual numpties telling us that renewables don’t cause a problem for grids. “could meet or exceed demand in 99.4 percent of hours, with load being met without imports from other regions and without turning to reserve storage. In addition, surplus power would be available to export in 8.6 percent of all hours, providing [...]

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How should we – not just the farmers but all of us, in Britain and worldwide – respond to the report from Wales that sheep are dying by the hundreds in snowdrifts up to 20 feet deep? We could just apply the logic of the neoliberal free market, and do whatever seems cheapest. Then – [...]

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Figures just published appeared to vindicate Germany’s clean energy revolution, showing that the country’s electricity surplus had nearly quadrupled between 2011 and 2012. Sure, Germany exports electricity. When the wind’s blowing and the Sun’s shining they have a large surplus. Which they must dump onto the electricity markets of other countries. Who would, likely (obviously, [...]

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Government to appoint ‘Lights Tsar’ to get Britain switching off Ministers are stepping up efforts to cut Britain’s energy usage ahead of a looming power crunch, with the creation of a taskforce charged with switching off the country’s lights. Ghastly little jobsworths marching around the country shouting “Put that light out”. The last time it [...]

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And as you would expect, doesn’t quite manage to get it right. And yet a vibrant, thriving agriculture sector is not some optional luxury. It’s not something we can take for granted. The availability of affordable, quality food – the robustness of British food security in the 21st century – depends upon it. OK, agreed. [...]

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George Monbiot: Clathrates are composed of a frozen matrix of water and gas, whose texture is rather like a sorbet. They are super-concentrated: a cubic metre of clathrate contains 164 times as much methane as a cubic metre of methane gas. Err, yes. You’ll normally find that solids are denser than gases, yes.

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Worth reading this in full. They’re thrashing around for anything, absolutely anything. Cuadrilla has halted experimentation in order to do an environmental study. The cessation of drilling is another blow to Cuadrilla, which has so far invested more than 100m in the UK over the past three years but has so far fracked at only [...]

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His embrace of evidence-based knowledge caused a problem. Mark Lynas faces that problem when he actually tries to find out facts. It can be a terrible shock, can’t it?

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Foreign firms cash in on fracking boom in the UK: Most companies licensed to drill using technique are not British-owned And? You mean that foreigners are willing to risk their capital, use their expertise, to produce lovely gas that we can then consume? This is a problem now, is it? The shale gas energy boom [...]

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Sea Shepherd conservation group declared ‘pirates’ in US court ruling Piracy on the High Seas with violence. And given that it is the High Seas then it is the duty of every nation to punish it. The ruling was issued on Wednesday by chief judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th US circuit court of appeals. [...]

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Thousands of Britain’s wind turbines will create more greenhouse gases than they save, Eh? The finding, which threatens the entire rationale of the onshore wind farm industry, will be made by Scottish government-funded researchers who devised the standard method used by developers to calculate “carbon payback time” for wind farms on peat soils. Wind farms [...]

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My word, shale gas won’t be a game changer at all. Nope, the people who support renewables tell us so. Exploitation of the UK’s significant shale gas resources is unlikely to result in low natural gas prices, according to new research by leading energy analysts Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The cost of shale gas extraction [...]

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Activists who occupied a power station for a week to highlight their opposition to producing electricity from natural gas are being sued for £5m by the owners of the plant in a move they claim will stifle the right to protest. Quite right too. A statement from EDF said it supported the right to “lawful [...]

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Ablett is just one of an army of litter vigilantes. Unpaid and unasked, they are ordinary men and women who have simply got so fed up with litter and mess that they have taken it upon themselves to do something about it. Many receive abuse for their trouble and others have run into problems with [...]

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EDF Energy has teamed up with Imperial College London to trial the new idea known as “day ahead electricity alerts”. The year-long trial aims to find out whether people are prepared to do their washing, tumble drying, and other electricity intensive tasks on windy days or at off peak times when green power is cheap [...]

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The people screaming about how subsidies to fossil fuels are evil, planet destroying and proof that capitalism will boil us all. Aren’t they all the same people who were insistent that we must keep the coal mines open by means of subsidies?

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Bhutan set to plough lone furrow as world’s first wholly organic country By shunning all but organic farming techniques, the Himalayan state will cement its status as a paradigm of sustainability My word, isn’t that lovely? Expect to see this trumpeted from the rooftops. The UN will praise it, the Greens, the greens, Greenpeace and [...]

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They were described as the ‘homes of the future’, with an eco-friendly design that would keep bills low. The 45 super-insulated houses, built with £5.6million of public money, were even held up as a ‘model’ of environmentally-friendly construction. But 18 months after the social housing complex in Bradford was completed, residents have complained of bills [...]

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It is of course the greens and environmentalists who have been screaming that the government must take action on fuel poverty. Something Must Be Done! And now something is being done: Even the companies involved in the green deal find it hard to explain how it will work. Here are some of the hoops needed [...]

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So, we know from the Greens that oil is the very devil. And we also know that plastics are the very devil. The reason oil used to be the devil is because there wasn’t much of it. Far too valuable to be just burned. And we had to recycle plastics because they were made from [...]

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