Technological change in electricity: why history matters

A discussion article in the Trade Unions for Energy Democracy bulletin. … "a future change in the technological system – and decarbonisation implies very sweeping change – can best be envisioned in the context of deep-going social, economic and political transformations".

We need to talk about technology

My article about air conditioning, in The Ecologist, questions some "left" eco-modernist dogma. It argues that a campaign for mass installation of air con is misconceived, that there are better ways to do temperature control in housing, and that the productivist thinking behind the idea is misconstrued.

Climate action means changing technological, social and economic systems

My comment article for The Ecologist: "Thinking about technological systems and their history can sharpen our understanding of how fossil fuel use has risen to levels associated with dangerous global warming – and of how a transition away from the fossil-fuel-intensive economy might happen. The ways in which these technological systems are embedded in the social and economic systems in which we live also matters."

Air conditioning, fossil fuels and history

My article in History Today magazine, September 2018. "Technological systems evolved as they did "because of the social and economic systems in which they are embedded"; transition away from fossil fuels means "wholesale transformation of all these systems."

Plastics and fossil fuels: follow the technological systems

My article in History Workshop Journal, 29 August. … "A sense of many histories – political, economic, social, technological – is needed to appreciate the roots of the rupture, symbolised by plastics, between human society and the natural world of which we are part."

The road away from fossil fuels

My article on the Red Pepper web site, 28 August. ... "Future historians will surely look back at the Rio process as a historic collective failure by the world’s leading states, on the scale of the slide to war in 1914."

Fossil fuel consumption since 1950: the other side of the extractivist coin

Presentation at the World Ecology Research Network conference in Helsinki, 16 August 2018.

How Did It Come to This? Unsustainable fossil fuel consumption in historical perspective, 1950-2018

Here are notes and slides from my presentation at a seminar on 24 May, at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, at the University of Manchester. The room was packed, there were loads of questions, and the researchers and students there engaged with the issues, made me think, and made me welcome.

Let's not exaggerate: Southern Gas Corridor prospects to 2030

The Southern Gas Corridor will by 2030 supply to Europe, at most, enough for an extra 15 bcm/year of capacity on the Trans Anatolian pipeline - and, probably, less than that, I argue in a working paper published today by the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

How Russia/EEU economic relations with the EU are reflected in the gas trade

Russian gas exports to the EU; the crisis of the Russia-Ukraine gas trade; and gas markets within the Eurasian Economic Union are covered in this presentation, given at a seminar at University College London (School of Slavonic and East European Studies).

The decline and fall of the Russia-Ukraine gas trade

Article in the Russian Analytical Digest (download here). … The Russia–Ukraine gas trade is being reduced to a shadow of its former self. Contracts between Gazprom and Naftogaz Ukrainy—for the import of Russian gas to Ukraine and the transit of Russian gas across Ukraine to European customers, in 2009–19—remain in place, but have been broken by both sides. This analysis examines the state of affairs after the final ruling of the arbitral tribunal and looks beyond 2019.

After the Gazprom-Naftogaz arbitration: commerce still entangled in politics

In this Oxford Energy Insight, on the big arbitration case between Russian and Ukrainian gas companies, I argue that "Commerce has been unable to disentangle itself from politics".