When people talk about the usefulness of markets, the benefit to migrating birds is usually not high on the list. And yet in California crowd sourced data, a mobile phone app and rice farmers in need of cash are combining to create a market solution to an ornithological puzzle. The Golden State is the key […]
Recent research by the Legatum Institute and Populus – featured on the CapX podcast this week – recently showed large public support for Jeremy Corbyn’s nationalisation agenda. Second on the list of things people were keen to see brought under state control was electricity at 77 per cent. The best way to prevent any future Government from […]
The link between climate change and violent conflict is a complex one. In specific circumstances changing weather patterns may lead to conflict. For example, people may be forced to leave their homes or grazing land and encroach on other communities. But the links are often exaggerated and oversimplified. Somalia is a case of subtle connections […]
The subject dominating so much of Conservative Conference is how the party can appeal to the new generation of politically active voters – the ones who helped strip the Government of its majority in June. From conversations in corridors to the standing-room-only fringe event on engaging young people, the realisation that the average age of party members […]
“What we’re saying to the politicians, regulators and customers is: let’s keep going – this [wind power] has been a huge success,” Scottish Power’s Keith Anderson gushed yesterday. It certainly has been for Mr Anderson and Scottish Power’s Spanish parent Iberdrola SA. You’ll be hard pressed to find more expensive electricity today than that being […]
In a previous column, I noted that the typical audience reaction to my talks about the improving state of the world is not joy and thankfulness for the progress that humanity is making in tackling age-old problems such as infant mortality, malnutrition and illiteracy. Rather, it is the concern about the exhaustion of natural resources […]
At an event in New Delhi last month, the Indian government’s chief economic adviser had strong words for critics of India’s energy sector. In a fiery defense of Indian coal energy, Arvind Subramanian – a former IMF economist who worked at Washington’s most influential development think tanks – made it clear his country needed practical […]
The announcement this week of far cheaper deals for offshore wind farms than any analysts predicted was well-received inside and outside the energy industry. Newspapers that had historically slated wind and solar power as “subsidy monkeys” joined clean energy supporters in celebrating what are by any standards remarkable cost reductions. A leader in The Times […]
It takes a certain mulish obstinacy to keep insisting that it’s capitalism and free markets which are responsible for, rather than the answer to, the coming Eco-Götterdämmerung. But that’s what we’re treated to from George Monbiot this morning. His argument is that capitalism requires growth, growth destroys the environment by consuming it and therefore….well, therefore […]
Everyone knows that renewable power is inherently unreliable, or as engineers put it: “intermittent”. Nonetheless, there is a plan in place to become ever more reliant on these technologies for our electricity supply. This has forced the government into taking a risky bet on unproven “flexibility measures”, in a desperate attempt to try and manage […]
Imagine a sausage factory – the luckiest, most profitable sausage factory in the world. Its machines crank out their sausages, and lorries carry them to supermarkets. So far, so normal. But this particular factory makes as many sausages as the management and staff choose. If they feel like taking the day off, the lorries and […]
I thought that Michael Gove was supposed to be one of the clever ones – I was wrong. For Gove has decided that the sale of all new diesel and petrol cars is to be banned in the UK from 2040. Exactly and precisely what every economist concerned about climate change has been howling must […]
Late last year, I gave a talk about human progress to an audience of college students in Ottawa, Canada. I went through the usual multitude of indicators – rising life expectancy, literacy and per capita incomes; declining infant mortality, malnutrition and cancer death rates – to show that the world was becoming a much better […]
Britain is still coming to terms with the tragic fire at Grenfell Tower – and still casting around for people to blame. But even as we try to understand how and why these people died, there’s something else we need to grapple with: namely, why were they living in that tower block in the first […]
The entire right-thinking world is aghast that Donald Trump has pulled the United States out of the Paris Accord. Yet the truth is it doesn’t matter a damn. Not because climate change doesn’t matter, but because of what we’ve already done about it. Let’s take as our starting point the idea that the IPCC is […]
The Conservative Party has put energy at the heart of this general election campaign by pledging a price cap. The business secretary, Greg Clark, says he wants the market to treat people in a “fair and reasonable” manner. This comes after the Competition and Markets Authority found people had overpaid by £1.4 billion a year […]
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