Labour’s persistent failure to address its electorate’s salient concerns is behind the protest vote, asserts DIANE ABBOTT
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Mass insulation meets the Jevons Paradox
A planned carbon capture storage plant sits uneasily alongside continued inaction on home insulation — how can we make sure any new ‘efficiency’ does not lead to greater consumption — and should we, ask ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and JOEL HELLEWELL
In England, there are nearly seven million homes with solid walls. Currently, less than 10 per cent of those have solid insulation. The situation is better for homes with cavity walls: out of 16 million, nearly 70 per cent have cavity insulation — although that means that five million remain without.
Washington’s lawless behaviour towards countries in the region it considers its ‘back yard’ should be condemned by all law-abiding people, says LUKE DANIELS
In part I of a serialisation of his new book, JOHN McINALLY takes a look at the early days of organising government workers
Colombia’s success in controlling the drug trade should be recognised and its sovereignty respected, argues Dr GLORY SAAVEDRA
The shadow lord chancellor has recently made a name for himself as an rabid hater of immigration – but there are exceptions to every rule, says SOLOMON HUGHES
Plaid Cymru’s front-bench spokesman on health and social services MABON AP GWYNFOR, in a two-part series, analyses the Caerphilly by-election and the wider political scene in Wales ahead of the 2026 Senedd election
IN 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons wrote a book called The Coal Question. In it, he considered a paradoxical fact about technological progress.
One might assume that increases in the efficiency of burning coal would mean that there would be a corresponding reduction in its use because less was needed to achieve the same aims. But as Jevons noted, “it is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.”
The Jevons Paradox states that increases in efficiency lead to increases in demand. A century-and-a-half later, it remains depressingly relevant.
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The government’s nuclear power expansion plan is a hollow betrayal of working people that panders to wealthy corporations and will rip off consumers, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
But Unite warns that Labour has ‘missed a golden opportunity to bring the national grid under public ownership’