How Green Is Green Electricity?

Water wars in the Promised Land

There was a time when oil and gas reserves seemed endless…
– Recent Shell advertisement

1965 was an incredibly significant year for modern civilisation. Because, although this fact went largely unremarked for three decades, it was the year in which our rate of crude oil discovery stopped rising and began to fall. It was the year of peak discovery, and since 1965 we have been steadily finding less.

It goes without saying that we must discover oil before we can extract it. It also goes without saying that if we extract more than we discover on a regular basis, that we will eventually exhaust any surplus reserves built up during the period we were discovering more than we were extracting. Right now the world is consuming four times as much as it discovers. And that has been the case for many years.
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It’s madness. Madness I tell you!

Our absurdly unrepresentative government (elected by 22% of registered voters) led by the most distant and disconnected Prime Minister since the mad bloke who talked to trees (yes, I know he was a king not PM, but there’s every chance he thought he was prime minister from time to time just as Blair, I feel sure, has a habit of thinking he’s a king) is now openly allowing the demands of drug-dealers to shape health policy.

What the hell is going on?
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Could it have been any less interesting? I began to get the feeling (sometime around 3am) that someone was actively editing all the drama out of the election. A vague paranoia set in that perhaps Rupert Murdoch had bought the rights to all the exciting constituencies. But no, it was just as underwhelming over on Sky News, and they didn’t have Paxman. Read More