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Ahead of the European Council meeting on 11th December, which will discuss EU energy policy, leading economist Ruth Lea warns in a new briefing paper for the TaxPayers' Alliance and Global Vision that the proposed EU Renewables Directive would drive up electricity costs, harm the economy and increase fuel poverty. In a comprehensive survey of research on the issue by the British Government, the House of Lords and leading think tanks and energy consultancies, she concludes that the potential costs of the Directive will be unsustainably high for consumers, businesses and the economy as a whole.

ACROSS the road from a golf course and next to a verdant, cow-filled field in Whetstone, a village about as far from the sea as it is possible to get in England, there is a ship's engine-room in a barn. The area is dripping with history—Frank Whittle, one of the inventors of the jet engine, used a neighbouring shed for his project—but this is not some clanking historical curiosity, such as a steam engine rebuilt by an amateur enthusiast. The whirring gas turbine and whining motor being put through their paces in bucolic Leicestershire are at the cutting edge of maritime engineering. The electric drive being tested there could represent the next leap forward in ship design, as significant a technological shift as the one from sail to steam power in the 19th century.

IN WONKISH circles, energy efficiency used to be known as “the fifth fuel”: it can help to satisfy growing demand for energy just as surely as coal, gas, oil or uranium can. But in these environmentally conscious times it has been climbing the rankings. Whereas the burning of fossil fuels releases greenhouse gases, which contribute to global warming, and nuclear plants generate life-threatening waste, the only by-product of energy efficiency is wealth, in the form of lower fuel bills and less spending on power stations, pipelines and so forth. No wonder that wonks now tend to prefer “negawatts” to megawatts as the best method of slaking the world's growing thirst for energy.

The story also proves that we are moving from an exceptional era of abundance to an era of new scarcities with big ramifications in terms of potential diplomatic and military conflicts.

Dr Schmid calculates that a DC grid of the sort he envisages would allow wind to supply at least 30% of the power needed in Europe.

four weeks

What should we do about climate change? The question is an ethical one. Science, including the science of economics, can help discover the causes and effects of climate change. It can also help work out what we can do about climate change. But what we should do is an ethical question.

Weighing our own prosperity against the chances that climate change will diminish the well-being of our grandchildren calls on economists to make hard ethical judgments

You really can’t equate electricity with an airline trip or a telephone. You don’t have to take that trip. Or not use the phone. We use electricity thoughout our day. Washing our clothes, refrigerating our food, computers, etc. It is pervasive. Some economists say electricity isn't suited to competition because it's needed 24 hours a day and can't be stored, giving sellers too much leverage.

This illiteracy has caused us to focus on the wrong problems, and the wrong solutions ... and it's stalled the realization of any politically tenable carbon reductions.Ironically, while the goal of reducing carbon emissions has political allies and adversaries, the economic illiteracy is found on both sides. It has become self-reinforcing. The only solace is that the economists are just as guilty.

Nearly 3,000 Ohioans and about 500,000 other Americans are already employed by industries assembling or making parts for renewable-energy equipment such as wind turbines, solar panels and ethanol, economist Roger Bezdek reported in a comprehensive study released Thursday.

Keynes goes further, to explain how economists move from simplifying assumptions to abandonment of the actual facts, and to conclude that reality is what their model says.

Do high oil prices cause recessions? The US economist James Hamilton is famous for his 1983 finding that oil price spikes had preceded all but one post-war US recessions[1]. Hamilton recently claimed that the current recession can be fully accounted for by the high oil prices of 2007-08. But while oil prices are certainly an important macroeconomic variable, it is just not plausible that they have anything like the impact that Hamilton suggests.