If you have dropped by here before you will probably have spotted some stuff about sustainability. Last year I did some research with my friends at the School of Architecture at Nottingham University; the topic was ‘are green buildings more valuable’. The answer was ‘no’. But there was more to it than that!

I’m not sure about ‘global warming’ – the case isn’t helped by the likes of the East Anglia University scandal over match-rigging. If they had been Badminton players we could have just sent them home and forgotten the whole affair. But we can’t – because this is important. And we don’t have transparency. So cynics (like me) will just question the ‘facts’ as we are given them.

But I do wonder what is happening around us. We have just had the wettest summer for 100 years. It has been a wash-out. And when we do get rain, it seems to come monsoon like! Last week I had to pull my car over onto what I assumed was the hard shoulder as I couldn’t see the bonnet!

Perhaps we do need to look after the planet and reduce what we use.

Which got me wondering about when people might change their behaviour. I think it will be when fuel poverty really hits home. We are constantly being warned about how fuel prices are rising. So I wondered about this. Through my office I have obtained the data for wholesale retail prices for gas and electricity going back over 5 years – the data is set out below…

As you can see this isn’t a doom and gloom story of sharp rises. I’m not advocating price increase – far from it. But unless we had a sharp rise which affected people’s pockets we will just continue to be in denial?