Dieter Helm— Fast-forward to 2050—almost thirty-five years from now. What will the world look like? How will technology have transformed our daily lives? Will it be a world of robots and artificial intelligence (AI)? Of graphene, fusion, and electric transport? Now rewind—back to 1980. This was still a world of
Dieter Helm— When the Saudis decided to draw a halt to the great shale oil boom in the United States at the end of 2014, they thought they could administer a short, sharp shock of lower prices that would kill off this threat, and then the market would rebalance again
Dieter Helm— The simple answer is that if Paris is the best we can do to decarbonize the global energy system, the companies can relax and carry on as usual. Paris keeps the climate change bureaucracy in business, and the UN in the game, but it emphatically does not do
Dieter Helm— Decarbonization should eventually bring about the end of fossil fuels, but they face a much more immediate threat. That threat is digitalization. Everything digital is electric. The future of energy is therefore electric too. Whilst there are some people who think that the impact of the communications revolution
Dieter Helm— The Trump narrative on energy is, like his on manufacturing, full of holes. But this might not matter much. What is going on in the oil and gas markets, and what is going on in the US, may produce results for which he can claim the credit, even
Dieter Helm— The trouble with strong sustainability is that it contains very little by way of guidance as to what we should do, except ‘preserve everything’. It is in essence the claim that natural capital should be regarded as non-substitutable, and hence, following Eric Neumayer, strong sustainability can be called
Dieter Helm’s The Carbon Crunch takes a look at the world’s failure to adequately address climate change and proposes pragmatic, much-needed solutions. The following excerpt is from the preface to the revised and updated edition. The underlying position continues to deteriorate. In 2012, another 2 parts per million (ppm) of
As a reflection of the state of environmental debates in the United States, the Senate recently could not pass an amendment to the Keystone XL pipeline bill affirming that “human activity significantly contributes to climate change” (although an earlier amendment to the bill declaring the “climate change is real and
Dieter Helm— Earth Day is one of those great occasions when lots of people with goodwill and concern vent their frustrations at the destruction of our natural environment. They are right to do so, but they are wrong to expect much to happen. It is mostly a dialogue between like-minded