David Fickling

Many builders in China are working through an inventory of sites accumulated more than half a decade ago, finishing off apartments with the help of government programmes.

China’s building crash helps ease the Hormuz pain

2026-07-27T09:00:00.000Z
Governments subsidise carbon-based energy to make it artificially cheap, which encourages us to use more polluting energy and deters us from making the switch to cleaner alternatives.

Who’s really keeping fossil fuels alive? Taxpayers globally

2026-07-06T10:00:00.000Z
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has disrupted exports of aluminium from smelters in the Persian Gulf, and that has hit beverage manufacturers in India.

The Iran war is coming for your Diet Coke

2026-05-25T22:30:00.000Z
LNG may find a way to soldier on as a raw material for the chemicals industry, but prospects for the roughly 40% that goes into power generation look bleak.

Why US$70 should be the most worrying number for LNG

2026-05-12T10:00:00.000Z
The 1953 Nissho Maru incident is largely forgotten, but prefigured the great geopolitical emergencies of subsequent decades.

A forgotten crisis explains today’s oil shock

2026-03-31T09:21:55.000Z
With a fresh Middle Eastern oil crisis building, Asian EV  manufacturers are poised to seize a new market, says the writer.

Expensive oil is EV makers’ best sales pitch

2026-03-25T08:43:57.000Z
The building blocks of the technology industry are deeply dependent on petroleum flowing through the Strait of Hormuz.

Hormuz is the hidden risk to the AI economy

2026-03-06T07:44:53.000Z
Shipping accounts for about 3% of global emissions, similar to all the aircraft in the sky.
THE BOTTOM LINE

The ships moving global trade are going electric

2026-02-18T23:00:00.000Z
Elon Musk's Starlink network has nearly 10,000 orbiters so far.

Musk is beating China’s 203,000 paper satellites

2026-02-16T23:00:00.000Z
Solar panels are arranged to resemble pandas at a power plant in Datong. Even with a headlong renewables build-out, China's rising electricity consumption means that any shortfalls are met by coal generators.

China’s energy future still runs on old technology

2026-02-09T06:38:54.000Z