David Fickling

The fortunes of a remote tungsten pit have risen and fallen through more than a century of conflicts. The critical mineral could now be a deterrent.

To judge by the way many people discuss the energy transition, we’re engaged in a fight between green idealogues in government and academia on the one hand, and a more realistic private sector that recognizes the innate superiority of fossil fuels on the other.

TO JUDGE by the way many people discuss the energy transition, we are engaged in a fight between green idealogues in government and academia on the

Since the dawn of the nuclear age, techno-evangelists have been promising electricity too cheap to meter. It’s never quite made it — until now.

The public sector still invests most of its money in oil, gas and coal, says David Fickling for Bloomberg Opinion.

If you knew your local Coke factory was having chronic supply-chain problems, buying a bigger refrigerator to store more soda would be one way to deal with it. The better strategy, however, might be to switch to Pepsi instead. And yet the “bigger refrigerator” path is the one governments in Asia are following to protect themselves against any repeat of the oil shortages prompted by this year’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

For most of the world, the commodity crisis of 1973 was all about oil: An Arab-Israeli war, tense OPEC meetings, and anxious queues at gas stations. In Japan, a separate embargo a few months earlier delivered an almost comparable psychological blow: The soy shock.

For all China’s breakthroughs in clean technology and disruptive strength in artificial intelligence, there’s one area of frontier engineering where America is still way ahead: space. That may be about to change.

For all China's breakthroughs in clean technology and disruptive strength in artificial intelligence, there's one area of frontier engineering where America is still way ahead: space. That may be about to change.