First blog for a bit – last week I was walloped by what I thought was a bit of a cold at first, but escalated I ended up in bed for most of 3 days, just crawling out from under my duvet to edit last week’s podcast, before retreating back into its warm embrace. I’m much better this week, but far from 100%, so today’s blog is a bit of a ramble through my feverish thoughts of the last week.

Just as my first sniffles started to escalate last Tuesday, I was out on the doorstep with Sir Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, seeking my re-election for a sixth/seventh term on the Council depending on how you count it. I try to keep party politics off this blog, but Ed never gets the kudos for his time as Energy and Net Zero secretary, where, along with his predecessor Chris Huhne, he introduced Contracts for Difference which has turbocharged renewables investment, and the Carbon Floor Price which quietly killed off our coal fired power plants. Those measures have had long lasting and significant effects on the UK’s low carbon transition to this day. It is an unfortunate fact that the impact of energy policies usually come long after the politician who introduced them has gone. For example, most of the bile chucked at the current SoS, Ed Miliband, relates to the impacts of policies introduced by his predecessors, some of whom are now blaming him for their own actions/negligence, but, hey, that’s politics for ya. Unfortunately the low carbon transition never came up during our canvassing.

In the wider world, obviously all eyes are still on the Strait of Hormuz and if and when the oil, gas and fertiliser tankers will start sailing again. Predicting what two arguably insane adversaries are going to do next is impossible, so the question is, what can we do to reduce our exposure to such high fossil fuel costs?

Unsurprisingly, interest in EVs, home solar and home battery systems has shot up as people realise how vulnerable fossil fuel supply chains really are. However, I bumped into my local bike shop owner at the weekend, and he told me hasn’t much of a rise in interest in bike sales, or getting Covid bikes out of the shed and moving again. That’s still an easy opportunity to grasp…

For all the UK ‘drill, baby, drill’ voices (I’m staying neutral but sceptical on this, btw), it is noticeable that retail fuel prices have risen fast in Norway and the US, both major oil and gas exporters, showing that we are all affected by squeezes in the global economy, no matter what reserves we have on our doorstep. But the news that India installed more solar in one year, 2025, than the entire installed capacity in the UK or Spain shows how things are changing. While high prices will help fill the coffers of the fossil fuel industry, they are also busy hammering nails into its coffin.

There are also many irritations: some the usual arguments, some novel ones. Even the Guardian today published data on the well-to-power plant emissions of different sources of gas without showing the emissions when you actually burn the stuff which would show how the differences are relatively minor in context. And the shrill voices on X now claim that solar panels leach dangerous amounts of lead and cadmium through ‘micro-cracks’ – note that many who are screeching about this also want to start fracking in the same green and pleasant land.

The evidence on these issues always lags well behind the hysteria and then gets ignored when it emerges. For example, one of the older complaints about wind farms – their impact on birds – has been countered by the study of bird strikes in a wind farm found no evidence of any fatalities over an eight year period. Another study linked ‘wind turbine syndrome’ to the amount of public outrage about ‘wind turbine syndrome’ in that location. Actually, I can understand that – I am the most psychosomatic hypochondriac you could ever meet. But this week, I really have been ill.