John Constable
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Articles by John Constable
Climate change is real, but it is an unfortunate fact that renewables are useless
Global energy consumption has tripled since the early 1970s – but virtually all of that growth has been supplied by oil, coal and gas - Chris Conway Panic, always a mistake, is most dangerous when the problem is real. And the ill-informed panic of the educated is worst of all, since it guarantees the selection of specious and even counterproductive remedies.
Renewable Energy Will Impoverish Humanity
Written by John Constable on July 8, 2026. Posted in Current News The modern world and the rich, free lives it brought are both dying in Britain. Energy consumption has fallen by about 30% since 2005 and electricity consumption by about 23%, both due to climate policy costs, and particularly that of renewable energy, subsidies to which amount to £25 billion a year, 40% of the total cost of electricity supply.
Renewable Energy Will Impoverish Humanity
This is the eighth in a series of 13 articles challenging climate change orthodoxy commissioned by Professor Gwythian Prins. We will be publishing the articles at a rate of one a week (read the first article here, the second here, the third here, the fourth here, the fifth here, the sixth here and the seventh here). The hope is that they can be collected into a book for Sixth Formers and university students. The modern world and the rich, free lives it brought are both dying in Britain.
10 ANNI A CASA DE RODIS
In occasione dei 10 anni di Casa De Rodis, la mostra propone 10 opere di 10 diversi artisti della Collezione Poscio e 3 di queste saranno messe in dialogo con il progetto site-specific “INTERSPAZIO – Dialoghi Sospesi tra Segno Forma e Memoria” dell’artista contemporaneo Matteo Ufocinque Capobianco Comunicato stampa Segnala l'evento Casa De Rodis a Domodossola, spazio voluto e creato dalla famiglia Poscio per far vivere la sua collezione d’arte attraverso mostre ed eventi, compie 10 anni e,...
Lets try out iRODS 5.0.1!
iRODS 5.0.1 was released recently, around the time of the User Group Meeting. A LinkedIn poll I wrote showed that most people haven’t had a chance to try it out, so I thought I would write up how to do so from base principles. What you need 1. Docker or similar container management. I’ve written these instructions for Docker, but if you use podman or other management systems, you’re hopefully Au-fiat enough to translate the commands. 2. Linux command line knowledge.
6 Mystery & Thriller Picks for the Paranoid
in Books to Read if You Like..., eBook, Mystery, News, Thriller 6 Mystery & Thriller Picks for the Paranoid In these stories, no one’s innocent, and everyone has something to hide. From locked-room crimes to psychological warfare, the tension builds as the truth stays just out of reach. For readers who love red herrings and second-guessing everything.
Glastonbury for St George 7pm on 23rd April
There's more to England's patron saint than nationalism and militarism. This 23rd April in Glastonbury Town Hall we celebrate George as a truly international figure, honoured across Europe from Belgium to Bulgaria, including Georgia which is named after him. In Catalonia, Sant Jordi is honoured on El Día de los Amantes ('The Day of Lovers') when men give their lovers a rose and women gift a book.
The art of a storm: beauty, brutality, and bedlam
Few sights are as awe-inspiring and fear-inducing as a storm. Generations have written, drawn, and created in an attempt to recreate the sublime feeling of this natural turbulence. Storm Eowyn, as it recently hit Britain and Ireland, was an inspiring force for many to return to past depictions of stormy weather. In their multitudes of subjects, of religious, historic, or imagined capabilities, one can notice the recurring theme of power and instability.
Don’t bet on green energy
Groupthink has blinded us into backing solar and wind. Will a big short make us see sense? This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. Small misperceptions of value create opportunities for those seeking to profit from eventual market corrections. Such minor prospects are common — but extraordinary opportunities are offered by gross misperceptions. However, they are very rare.
The terrifying scale of the green revolution
Many have been emotionally drawn to the green revolution in the belief that renewable energy will restore our personal and community independence. According to this, by investing in green technology, Britain will gain freedom from coal barons and gouging sheikhs, and deliver a grass-roots, democratic energy system.
Big Green makes Big Oil look like a Midget. Why?
Many have been emotionally drawn to the green revolution in the belief that renewable energy represents the free spirit, restoring personal and community independence, bringing freedom from coal barons and gouging sheikhs, and above all delivering a grass-roots, “alternative”, democratic energy system where, in Schumacher’s resonant words, “Small is Beautiful”.
Supreme Court brews up trouble for Starmer
The Supreme Court has today opened a can of worms large enough to envelop the whole of the United Land use planning system. By a majority verdict, 3 to 2, the judges upheld a claim by a local resident who claimed that the local planning authority had acted unlawfully by failing to take into account the downstream emissions consequent on using the oil that would be extracted from the expansion of a small well in Surrey. The decision documents can be found here.
Child mortality and ‘realignment of societal values’
Sir David King is perhaps the purest and sincerest climate change catastrophist prominent in British public life. At a time when his academic colleagues are beginning to express concern about activist propagandising from the Ivory Tower (Büntgen 2024), correctly sensing that it is counterproductive, Sir David continues to rush in where others are now fearing to tread.
Yet more subsidies for renewables
The UK government has finally cottoned on to the fact that the hugely lucrative income-support schemes for renewables have been encouraging the import of components manufactured overseas, in countries such as China, with embarrassingly high levels of embedded emissions. Rising costs in the UK, partly caused by renewables subsidies themselves, are in large part to blame.
The Net Zero juggernaut grinds relentlessly onwards
Did you know that there is an Interministerial Group for Net Zero, Energy and Climate Change? Hardly anyone does. But there is such a thing, comprising representatives of the UK Government, the Welsh Government the Scottish Government and the Northern Ireland Executive, which together form the UK Emission Trading Scheme Authority, and it issues, in the style of aristocratic, haut en bas, international diplomacy, occasional ‘Communiqués’ on its meetings.
UK energy sector paralysed by political uncertainty
While the Net Zero targets are being rolled back all over Europe out of necessity, Rishi Sunak’s government seems unable to take the required decisions to protect the UK consumer and national interest by supporting rather than hindering new fossil fuel projects on and offshore. The Labour Party, of course, is still enjoying the liberty being out of power and maintains its green posturing.
Russell Kirk: Christian Humanism and Conservatism
Russell Kirk was aware that others had also claimed the mantle of humanism, but in the name of secularism. The revival of Christian humanism in our time is spurred by the need to respond to the rise of this popular secular humanism and its half-truths.
The state of Texas…
Total system load is about 75 GW (for comparison peak load in the UK is approximately 50 to 60 GW). Of this peak, Texan wind is contributing about 5.2 GW, from a total capacity of 38 GW, and solar a small fraction of its capacity. The bulk of the heavy lifting and the provision of inertia is being done by natural gas (65%), coal (17.5%) and nuclear (7%), all thermodynamically competent sources with a high degree of round the clock reliability and dispatchability.
Top Most Famous 19th-Century Paintings
1. Cafe Terrace At Night, 2. The Card Players, 3. The Hay Wain, 4. The Kiss, 5. The Raft Of The Medusa, 6. The Gleaners, 7. Luncheon Of The Boating Party, 8. Wanderer Above The Sea Of Fog, 9. The Absinthe Drinker, 10. The Lady Of Shalott. The majority of those great nineteenth-century artists were swept up in the wave of modern art, which began with realism and moved to impressionism. In this article, Toplist introduces to you the 10 most famous 19th-century paintings.
UK Govt’s green subsidy ‘reform’ punishes the less well off again
Published on April 4, 2023 Written by Dr John Constable Commenting on today’s package of energy policies released by the UK government, Net Zero Watch warned that Rishi Sunak and his colleagues appear to have learned nothing from the bitter experiences of the energy cost crisis and are ignoring the growing burden of renewable energy In spite of unassailable evidence that renewables costs have not fallen, the Government not only intends to continue providing billions of pounds of subsidies,...
Striking 19Th- And 20Th-Century Art By John Constable, Karl ...
John Constable, Attributed: Blackberry Paysage Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Attributed: Two Faces Sam Francis, Attributed: Abstract Ex
The Fantasy World of Renewable Energy
Learning from history and from our own experience is usually reckoned a sign of wisdom. Strangely, that appears not to be the view of those employed at Carbon Brief. They have published a strikingly foolish prediction that renewable generation such as offshore wind will be vastly cheaper than gas generation in the late 2020s. That is a long way off. History tells us that price booms in oil and gas markets are invariably followed by price busts.
The Great European Energy Disaster
Since 1990, the European Union has pursued a rapid decarbonisation strategy, at first based largely on emissions trading but increasingly reliant on thermodynamically incompetent renewable energy. The intention was to internalize the environmental and specifically the climatic externalities of the EU’s energy consumption, and in so doing to show leadership to the world and achieve dominant market share in the new low carbon industries that were believed to be on the verge of economic viability.
The Renewable Energy Cure Is Worse Than The Disease
The Renewable Energy Cure Is Worse Than The Disease
The Energy of Nations
Editor's note: Earlier versions of some of the ideas in this article have appeared in the Financial Post of Canada. I. Energy consumption in the West is faltering Since about 2005, and in almost every Western economy, something historically unprecedented and extremely alarming has been happening to energy consumption: it’s either flatlining or in decline.
London’s National Gallery Removes Disgraced Sackler Name From Walls
London’s prestigious National Gallery, containing much of the UK’s most prized art, has removed the name of one of its biggest donors, Sackler – the disgraced pharmaceuticals dynasty. The Times reports that staff have removed the now infamous name from the room – technically Room 34, but for 30 years known as ‘the Sackler gallery’ – where James Bond (Daniel Craig) sat down with Q (Ben Whishaw) for a covert chat in Skyfall.
John Constable | The Hay Wain | NG1207 | National Gallery, London
The view is of the millpond at Flatford on the River Stour. Flatford Mill was a watermill for grinding corn, operated by the Constable family for nearly a hundred years. It still survives and is about a mile from Constable’s birthplace at East Bergholt, Suffolk. The house on the left also survives; in Constable’s time it was occupied by tenant farmer Willy Lott. The title, The Hay Wain, refers to the wooden wagon (wain) used for transporting cut and dried meadow grass (hay).
Coal (not wind) keeps the lights on at COP26
THE UK’s failing renewable strategy is a national embarrassment. Critically low wind power for nearly the whole of Wednesday resulted in extremely high prices, with the two remaining coal units at Drax offering to save the day at £4,000/MWh, nearly 100 times the wholesale price normal before the current crisis started, with many other fossil fuel generators riding to the rescue at staggering prices. Indeed, November 3 saw a record for the total daily cost of balancing the GB electricity grid.
Coal Keeps Lights On At COP26 As Low Wind Strikes Again
By John Constable of NetZeroWatch The UK’s failing renewable strategy is a national embarrassment. Critically low wind power, for nearly the whole of yesterday, resulted in extremely high prices, with the two remaining coal units at Drax offering to saving the day at £4,000/MWh, nearly 100 times the wholesale price normal before the current crisis started, with many other fossil fuel generators also riding to the rescue at staggering prices.
Coal Keeps Lights On At COP26 As Low Wind Strikes Again
By John Constable of NetZeroWatch The UK’s failing renewable strategy is a national embarrassment. Critically low wind power, for nearly the whole of yesterday, resulted in extremely high prices, with the two remaining coal units at Drax offering to saving the day at £4,000/MWh, nearly 100 times the wholesale price normal before the current crisis started, with many other fossil fuel generators also riding to the rescue at staggering prices.
John Constable: The Human Progress Podcast Ep. 13 Transcript
The full interview between Marian Tupy and John Constable can be found here. The transcript is below. Marian Tupy: John Constable is a British energy analyst and the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s energy editor. Amongst his many energy-related publications are: The Green Mirage, Why The Low Carbon Economy May Be Further Off Than We Think, Energy Policy and Consumer Hardship, and Shortfall, Rebound and Backfire. Can we rely on energy efficiency to offset climate policy costs?
Committees - UK Parliament
Committee to hear evidence on net zero policies The Industry and Regulators Committee will speak to campaigners and former policymakers about the costs of net zero, the Government’s plans for the transition and the role of Ofgem, the energy regulator. The Committee will discuss the cost and potential impacts of a more renewable energy system, how policymakers should consider the interests of future generations, and the role of carbon pricing.
Net-Zero Wind: Britain Saved By Coal - At Huge Cost
Written by Dr John Constable, guest post on Sep 7, 2021. Posted in Latest news Yesterday, National Grid, the Electricity System Operator, was forced to pay over £20m to “balance” the system and avoid blackouts, ten times more than normal. The entire UK wind fleet was in effect completely absent for much of the day, only rising above a few percent of its theoretical output late in the day when the crisis was over. As a result, conventional gas- and coal-fired generators had to be fired up.
Why did anyone ever believe this green-power nonsense?
WHEN soap bubbles burst they vanish in an instant. Financial bubbles by their nature take a little longer to deflate, and doubtless the renewables industry bubble will take several years, not least because it has vested interests puffing the sector harder and faster than the realists, such as ourselves, can pick holes. But eventually, the lobbyists will run out of breath and the tissue of propaganda will be more holes than substance. The wretched pretence will collapse in an embarrassing mess.
John Constable | The Cornfield | NG130 | National Gallery, London
A boy has paused from the thirsty work of herding sheep at noon to lie flat on the bank of a pool and drink its cool water. This vision of a Suffolk lane in high summer was painted in January to March 1826 in Constable’s studio in London. The lane winding into the cornfield is based on Fen Lane, along which Constable had often walked as a boy from his own village of East Bergholt to Dedham, where he attended school. The lane still exists but the countryside shown beyond it was largely invented.
A workable alternative to Net Zero
Current Net Zero plans and roadmaps branded 'utopian and unsustainable' London 18 May -- With mounting concern in the media about the true cost of the Government’s Net Zero project the Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) is today publishing a realistic alternative that reduces CO2 emissions without inflicting astronomical costs on consumers.
The Green Mirage: Why a Low-Carbon Economy May Be Further Off Than We Think
The Green Mirage: Why a Low-Carbon Economy May Be Further Off Than We Think
Publications - A LITTLE NUDGE WITH A BIG STICK MISREPORTING ENERGY USE AND EMISSIONS IS NOW A CRIME IN THE UK
February 26, 2021 By John Constable The United Kingdom’s Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting law makes it a criminal offence to fail to report or to misreport energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, punishable by an unlimited fine. The United Kingdom’s Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting law makes it a criminal offence to fail to report or to misreport energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, punishable by an unlimited fine.
U.S. Offshore Wind Prospects: Overblown Promises and Blown-Up Costs | National Review
The Walney Extension offshore wind farm off the coast of Blackpool, England, in 2018. (Phil Noble/Reuters) When it comes to the supposed strength of renewables, nature cannot be fooled. In energy policy, it is physics that matters above all else.
Johnson’s crazy Net Zero drive will cost so much more than it saves
IF AN elected government were embarking on a multi-generational transformation of the country’s society and economy, any reasonable citizen would expect the administration to have looked very carefully into the costs.
The Costs of Offshore Wind Power: Blindness and Insight
The dramatically falling costs of renewables are now a political, a media, and conversational cliché. However, the claim is demonstrably false. Audited accounts show that far from getting cheaper, wind power is actually becoming more expensive.
The Fatal Attraction of a Post-Covid Green New Deal
The Treasury Select Committee, currently chaired by the Rt Hon Mel Stride MP, has relaunched its inquiry into the economic implications of the 2050 Net Zero emissions target.[1] In addition to its previous questions, published last year, the committee is now asking whether the government’s offer of post-Covid economic support packages should discriminate between companies on the basis of the degree to which they ‘pollute’; whether ‘Green infrastructure’ should be part of the Coronavirus...
TCW’s top ten blogs of the week
IN CASE you missed any of our ten most read blogs of last week, here they are for you again – and well worth the read. Kathy Gyngell: Jordan Peterson debunks white privilege Chris McGovern: Was Mary Seacole racist?
Don’t the Gunners realise BLM play on the Left wing?
I HAVE a deep-rooted attachment to Arsenal FC. My family moved to London during the 19th century and became supporters, passing their enthusiasm on to their progeny. But this bond with the Gunners is being stretched to breaking point. Exorbitant salaries are matched by exorbitant ticket prices, excluding the club’s working-class base and alienating them from a distant, aloof cast of players.
Daily News Digest
NEWS Riot police struggle to clear another London block party one day after ‘utterly vile’ violence in Brixton… but revellers just pack up and move to a different one a few streets away Just one day after riots in Brixton led to numerous police officers being injured whilst trying to break up a street rave, Metropolitan units have been called to attempt to break up parties across the capital.
Notes from the sticks: The great badger debate
IN MY piece on skylarks last week I said that they are in decline and that the RSPB and British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) attribute this to changes in farming practices. However commenter Far Canal suggested that badgers are mainly responsible. I thought I would look up facts about badgers, and found there are two sharply divided camps. The badger (properly the European badger, Meles meles) must be one of the most familiar animals in the country, yet most people have probably never seen one.
The Green Gollums mustn’t get their hands on energy
ENERGY doesn’t exist; it isn’t a ‘thing’. Paradoxically that is why it is so important, and why economists, who naively seem to believe that energy is a substance and just another input (and only a minority input at that), give such grievously bad advice on the subject.
TCW's Brexit Watch: Brussels is still after our fish
Michael St George’s selections for comment from recent Brexit-related media articles. NB: (£) denotes article behind paywall Frost outlines the areas he won’t sacrifice as he faces Barnier – Daily Express It’s reassuring that our chief Brexit negotiator David Frost is again insisting that on three specific policy areas which can be grouped under the generic heading of sovereignty – the law, the courts, and fishing – there can and will be no concessions to Brussels.
Notes from the sticks: What larks
A NUMBER of people have remarked that the reduction in traffic noise during the lockdown has meant that they can hear birdsong more clearly. There are lots of beautiful singers but perhaps the best of the lot is the skylark (Alauda arvensis). It’s an undistinguished-looking bird, apart from its jaunty crest which it can raise or lower, streaky brown and a little smaller than a starling. It is found in open countryside and on farmland from sea level to upland moors.
Readers’ Forum | The Conservative Woman
Our round-up of the best, most pertinent and amusing comments of the week that have caught our eye.
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