Dave Dorn of VapourTrails TV - an e-cigarette user and enthusiast – explains e-cigs and goes through some commonly held misconceptions.
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European Parliament: heading for an own goal? On Monday 25th February 2013, the European Parliament committee that is scrutinising the proposed EU Tobacco Products Directive holds a public hearing, and take evidence from invited witnesses. The committee is the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety Committee (known as ENVI). This post provides links to [...] Over regulating the alternatives is a form of protection for the most harmful and dominant form of nicotine delivery – cigarettes E-cigarettes represent an amazing market-based, user-driven public health insurgency. From nowhere to €500m in Europe, the market is growing rapidly and already almost equals the market for NRT, according to the European Commission’s consultants [...] Imagine your job is taking huge gambles with other people’s savings and pensions. Imagine also that the bets are arranged so that you are paid a fortune when things turn out well, but you don’t lose anything much when they go wrong. How would you behave…? I think you might rapidly develop a hog’s appetite [...] Another day, another broadside against carbon emissions trading. The FT’s Martin Wolf offers advice to the new Chancellor, including: While simplifying tax, he should also take a close look at green taxation. Simple taxes that apply across-the-board are what is needed. The grant of valuable rights to big polluters through systems known as [...] Long awaited 1st of July arrives, and most enclosed workplaces (including pubs and restaurants) in England will go smoke-free today [BBC]. It’s a triumph for all involved – both campaigners and government insiders – following a sustained struggle. It’s also a vital next step in dragging down smoking rates – see chart based [...] Hopes that Big Tobacco might be in retreat are looking pretty forlorn. I came across BAT’s share price data showing a huge gain over the last seven years, including a sharp and sustained rise following agreement of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) – an attempt by 146 governments (so far) [...] There is something stunning in the brilliance of Google Earth [download] – a streaming map of the world in the form of satellite photography with the mean to zoom from planet to street level in scale. ‘Layers’ are overlaid on the map images showing an ever expanding range of surface features: national boundaries, roads, video [...] I do occasionally enjoy an early morning BLT sandwich at Paddington station en route to the Bristol head office of my employer – a small comfort before what inevitably lies ahead. But imagine my horror to be informed that the humble bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich may have 31,000 “food miles” embodied in it (and [...] Saw Blood Diamond – an action-movie-with-a-message, though laced with clichés (mercenary with a heart of gold, pouting female journalist as searcher after truth, silly shoot-outs etc). But also brutal depiction of what the very dirty end of the diamond business looks like – militarised slave-labour , child soldiers, violent abuse like amputations and, of course, [...] What does Gordon Brown really feel about climate change and the Stern review? Right at the moment of the Stern launch, the Chancellor weighed in with what I felt was a kind of relief mixed with complacency, an assertion that, fundamentally, not much needs to change: “the world does not need to choose between averting [...] A couple of interesting reports on R&D… firstly the DTI’s R&D Scoreboard 2006, where clearly more is better – at least one assumes that’s the purpose of creating lists and league tables ordered by the sums spent (see chart from the report showing the world’s biggest R&D spenders). Note the big spenders are not necessarily [...] Whatever one thinks of the sanity of the projected growth in aviation as foreseen and accommodated in the aviation white paper, The Future of Air Transport, the project to build the £4 billion Terminal 5 at Heathrow has some fascinating lessons for project management and contracting – and wider commerce. Against the prevailing orthodoxy, the [...] An excellent report from Vivid Economics, titled The business opportunities for SMEs in tackling the causes of climate change, done for Shell’s Springboard programme. The particularly good thing about it is that it shows in clear terms how a market for environmental goods and services forms – primarily through policy interventions, as ‘the environment’ [...] World cigarette production is about 5.53 trillion sticks per year. (about 2.4 per day for every single person in the world). This is stabilising as people in developed countries quit and growing populations in the developing world start puffing. According to WHO’s tobacco group, death-toll from this is now about 5 million per year, heading [...] Annoying!!! I want to do something simple… plot a bar chart for a bunch of countries where the width of each bar = the population of the country, the height of the bar = its GDP/capita and hence area of the bar = its GDP. Clearly an insane requirement – who would ever want to [...] Just back from an excellent break in the Lake District, but had cause to reflect on the reasons for Britain’s poor record on economic productivity compared to the US. I’m convinced it’s little to do with the rise of China taking all our jobs, the failing biotech revolution, poor R&D spend or any of the [...] Just received a slightly irritating letter from Thames Water cheerfully suggesting: “Let’s beat the drought together”. At no point in the letter do they suggest that customers should ask to have a free water meter installed. Yet when people actually pay for the volume they use, they do actually use 10-20% less on average. Even [...] I’ve just done up my garden, including the purchase of a new garden table. I went to crocus.co.uk and ordered on-line…. and here it is pictured on-site. I was of course worried that this may be a table made of tropical hardwood – so I took some comfort from the Crocus’ hardwood guarantee, but was [...] Was presenting at an interesting Oxera conference today. Amazing suggestion – not quite a proposal – from one famous speaker… when the government stands behind the main networks, as it always will…. electricity, gas, water etc. why does the consumer pay market interest rates (as the government ultimately bears the risks)? In other words, why [...] |
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