Practical Thoughts

Dear Reader, There is a story (said to be true) about a holy man of recent times who demonstrated that he could change plain water into oil. So convinced was an entrepreneur, he said to the holy man, "Why not convert the whole ocean, and then we can make a fortune?" It (surely) does not take too much savvy to work out that  such an idea is  foolish nonsense. It should not need explanation that the oceans help to balance the life on planet Earth, and greatly contribute to weather conditions. etc. etc. We don't apply this kind of idea as it would (most likely)  simply  and  quickly lead us to a doomsday situation. That being the case, can't the same kind of logic be applied to fracking? It seems to me that the fracking concept is also capable of bringing about a  doomsday situation. There is a great concern that our water supplies could be affected, and some have even suggested that water is a communications system in its own right; equivalent to the ...

Dear Reader, I can hear them from here; the thumps of self-congratulation on the backs of the participants of the Paris Climate Summit. Now I am not at all cynical about any attempt to address the Climate Change that patently exists (it's been a major concern of mine for 40 years), but when the sponsors of the Paris Summit are some of the world's largest energy creation companies, then you do wonder if there is more to the Summit meeting that we should worry about. One sponsor was Engie. As a single entity, Engie is a massive energy company — according to the Brand Finance Brandirectory, it is the most valuable utilities company in the world, bringing in more than $80 billion in annual revenue. Engie emitted as much greenhouse gases in 2014 as the entire country of Belgium. And Engie isn’t the only company with ties to fossil fuels to be included as a sponsor at the Paris talks — corporations like Électricité de France (EDF), which operates 16 major coal plan...