Archive for the 'Global Politics' Category

Energy Generation

12/03/2007

I’ve written about energy several times before, but I seem to be reading more and more about it in the media and on various websites. At Christmas we got an electricity monitor, you plug it into your mains, program in how much you’re charged per unit and it calculates what your current spend is [...]

Bill Gates for President

30/11/2006

I had to post this, found via the ever-amazing Kottke (I’m going to get a shortcut key for inserting his link), this has to be the funniest thing I’ve read in ages, courtesy of Dilbert creator Scott Adams:
For my president I want a mixture of Mother Teresa, Carl Sagan, Warren Buffet, and Darth Vader. Bill [...]

Targetting Motorists

22/11/2006

It’s been a long held belief of mine and many other people in the UK that our government targets motorists as easy prey when it comes to things like emissions and fuel tax. I was reading an article about how they’ve converted a trawler to run on vegetable oil when I cam across this [...]

Commuting from Home

14/08/2006

There barely seems to be a day that goes by at the moment without some announcement or article covering the environment, housing, transport or energy. The world seems to be caught up in this. We’re all agreed fossil fuels are running out, oil especially, while demand is only increasing. I visit the [...]

Carbon Clean-up

12/08/2006

The BBC has a diary following Fulcrum Consulting as they take part, along with roughly 400 other businesses, in the 100 Days of Carbon Clean-Up challenge, which is run by the Chartered Institution of Building Service Engineers (Cibse) with support from the Carbon Trust.

All About the Figures

31/03/2006

According to the World Bank, the reconstruction of Iraq will cost $53bn (or so it says in this article), that’s to rebuild an entire country.
The latest estimates from the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) put the clean-up of existing nuclear sites in the UK at £70bn (that’s about $121bn).

Get Real on Climate Change

14/01/2006

I generally think that most governments haven’t got a firm grip on reality, the Bush administration more than most, but I read something today that takes the biscuit. Regarding the issue of climate change, US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said:
“I believe that the people who run the private sector, who run these companies - [...]

Millennium Villages

21/09/2005

I’ve written before on my thoughts about how to help tackle poverty and that money alone is not an answer, so it was nice to stumble across a pictorial on the BBC website about a UN Millennium Village that was doing well using a concerted, wide-ranging aid effort that involved help, advice and training and [...]

Clean-up Costs

17/08/2005

There was a story on the BBC last week about the proposed costs of shutting down and cleaning up the UK’s nuclear power stations. The story was the result of the first report by the relatively new (setup in April 2005) Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) who’s main job is ‘to take strategic responsibility for [...]

Selling Power

3/07/2005

It was recently announced that France had won the honour of basing the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter) project on its soil. About time too. The two contenders, France and Japan, had been fighting it out for the project. In the end, Japan conceded due to favourable terms (20% of the project [...]