The world’s overall energy consumption is set to increase by an incredible 56 per cent from 2010-2040, a new research study by the US Energy Information Administration has recently revealed.
Energy supplier E.ON has pledged its support for a full “industry-wide end” to automatic energy contract rollovers, in order to help small and medium-sized businesses save more on their energy bills, a news report on the matter reveals.
Energy saving has received a blow as various organisations were assessing how hard they would be hit by the £250 million of cuts imposed by the coalition government.
Shell and BP have both announced colossal profits but seem slow to reduce fuel prices. Shell’s chief executive Peter Voser gave growth in production and exploration of new oil fields as reasons for the company raising its profits for the first quarter to $4.9bn, almost 50% up on the same time last year.
A price comparison website has urged consumers to switch to fixed fuel tariffs after warnings came of another round of price rises; however installing HeatingSave is a wiser move to save money.
Climate change has hardly been mentioned in this year’s general election. Four parties – Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Green – were represented in the capital on a panel (chaired by The Independent newspaper) called Ask The Climate Question, a coalition of nine environment and development charities and pressure groups, which has been trying to bring global warming back to the forefront of the election agenda.
First it was the likes of BP and Shell. Now it is the turn of oil company Total to report much-improved profits for the first three months of the year. Net profit came in at $3bn (£2bn), a rise of almost 10% on the same period a year earlier. Total are under-fire, as a French judge filed preliminary charges against the company earlier this month, accusing it of bribing Iraqi officials while Saddam Hussein was in power in order to secure oil supplies.
Those who have pension funds or other investors must act now to make up for the falling BP share price. More than £56 billion has now been wiped off the company’s market value, since the Deepwater Horizon rig sank, killing 11 men and causing the huge oil leak on April 20. BP was, until this crisis, Britain’s biggest company.
Digital waste is an unknown but huge quantity – almost everything we do online increases our carbon footprint. Antivirus company McAfee has measured that the electricity needed just to transmit the trillions of spam e-mails sent every year is equivalent to powering two million homes in the United States and generates the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as that produced by three million cars.
On the market are many energy-saving gadgets which are claimed to be making a big difference to the amount of energy you use in your daily life. Among them is a Radiator Booster, which circulates the hot air that rises off your radiator much more quickly around the room. It claims to reduce energy costs for households by about £10 per month because it saves the boiler from doing as much work.
