Here's a bemusing statistic to follow on from the earlier post. -Question:- Given that the US federal deficit is expected to be $1.8 trillion this year, taking the total national debt to $12.8 trillion, by how much does the US government…

The left tend to enjoy a smug, patronizing sense that their views are the product of great intelligence, altruism, and encyclopaedic knowledge, while the right owe their views to ignorance, prejudice and a brutish love of money. But for…

It is becoming popular amongst Keynesians (and perhaps some monetarists too) to suggest that Western governments do not have a deficit problem, they just have a hiatus in their tax receipts. Government's job, therefore, is to help the…

One thing leads to another. The APPGOPO report covered in the previous post refers to the first report by the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil & Energy Security (ITPOES) on "The Oil Crunch: Securing the UK's Energy Future", which has been…

The All Party Parliamentary Group On Peak Oil (APPGOPO) has released a report backing Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs) as "the fairest and most productive way to deal with the oil crisis and to simultaneously guarantee reductions in fossil…

I have a post on the effect of the Government's plans to increase by a huge amount our use of intermittent wind power on future prices and availability of electricity on the Institute of Economic Affairs blog.

A virtue of -The Economist'-s focus this week on the vulnerability of our energy systems, regardless of whether they have got everything right (and there's plenty that's good as well as some that's bad) is that it has brought attention to…

Is it me, or is Robert Lucas's apologia for modern, mathematical macroeconomics in this week's -Economist-, effectively saying that their models are pretty good at predicting the economy will carry on in the direction it's currently going…

There are lots of good arguments for a carbon tax. Trust -The Economist- to come up with a bad one. "A tax on carbon is hardly going to stop the lights going out in a few years, but it would provide a floor price for power, giving investors…

It's -The Economist-'s turn to be hit repeatedly with a big stick on which we have painted the inequation: Energy ≠ Electricity. Their leader, "How long till the lights go out?" is on an important subject and makes quite a lot of important…

The Government and the opposition parties believe that climate-change and energy policy should revolve around identifying the technical solutions and their potential, calculating what each of them needs to encourage their deployment, and…

Speaking of the IEA (see previous post), Richard Wellings, their excellent Deputy Editorial Director, has posted a piece on their blog, on the recent slew of climate-change policies and targets from the Government. It is mostly well-judged…