Monday

18 Jan 2021

Covid-19 and the problem with ‘happiness’ research

Today is supposedly Blue Monday. Sixteen years ago, a travel agency published a press release claiming that the third Monday in January is the most depressing day of the year. The idea is superficially plausible. It’s mid-January. It’s cold. You’re skint after Christmas. You’re back at work after the weekend. There are worse candidates for the most miserable day of the year. But as a scientific claim, it was swiftly debunked and the academic responsible for it has since disowned it. It lives on as a way of filling space in newspapers and is probably most famous for being untrue. If it weren’t for the ‘I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that’ crowd popping up once a year to tell us that’s it’s pseudo-science, Blue Monday might have been forgotten by now.

Covid-19 and the problem with ‘happiness’ research

Monday

24 Jun 2019

How do we cut carbon and how fast can we go?

The 2019 Spectator Energy Summit opened with the chairman, Andrew Neil, listing the UK’s considerable achievements in cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon emissions are 43 per cent lower today than they were in 1990 and Britain’s energy supply recently functioned without coal for over a fortnight - something it had not done for well over a century. The UK has the best record of decarbonisation of any G20 country but, as Mr Neil noted, much of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. On the morning of the summit, the UK’s energy mix was 61 per cent natural gas, over 20 per cent nuclear and only four per cent wind. Energy from renewables varies enormously (wind was providing 25 per cent the night before), but it is nevertheless noteworthy that Britain was getting more power from France when the summit began that it was getting from wind.

How do we cut carbon and how fast can we go?

Wednesday

29 May 2019

Is the UK really ready to decarbonise?

With the Extinction Rebellion protests and the arrival of Greta Thunberg, climate change dominates the political agenda in a way it hasn’t done in years. The news that the UK went a whole week without using coal went viral around the world after Leonardo Di Caprio posted National Grid statistics on his Instagram. Meanwhile, the warnings of what the future could look like if we do nothing grew worse and worse. These concerns around climate change, and alarming figures for the number of deaths caused by air pollution, have led to mounting pressure on the government to be even more ambitious in its efforts to decarbonise the energy system. Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions are already 43 per cent below 1990 levels, and the country seems to be on track to meet the 80 per cent target for 2050, but much of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked.

Is the UK really ready to decarbonise?

Thursday

7 Sep 2017

The fat tax fallacy

James Cracknell, the athlete turned anti-obesity campaigner, was the subject of sniggering and derision in April when he said that North Korea and Cuba had got a ‘handle on obesity’. With impressive understatement, he attributed this to both countries being ‘quite controlling on behavioural trends’. It was a bad point poorly made, but in a roundabout way he drew attention to the major obstacles faced by those who want to reduce obesity rates in the rest of the world: freedom and affluence. Only Venezuela was missing from his list. Its people lost an average of 19 pounds last year as its basket-case economy unravelled, but this only serves to underline the point. Even the most fanatical nanny statist would hesitate before endorsing grinding poverty as a weight-loss strategy — and yet it is the only thing that seems to work.

The fat tax fallacy

Thursday

4 Jun 2015
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