The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Monday, November 08, 2004

News 2020

All the breaking news - fifteen years before events come together

The Prime Minister has announced a new package of enviro-scrupulous initiatives to make Britain's means of energy production more eco-friendly. The Prime Minister has long been known as a fervent enthusiast of the environment, and on several occasions he has expressed hearty disapproval of countries which in his view are not doing enough to combat climate change.

His dislike of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and heat waves was dramatically demonstrated last year when, in the middle of one of the most catastrophic summers on record, when over a thousand Britons died of heatstroke and five coastal villages fell into the English Channel, the Prime Minister went on a water-skiing holiday in the Arctic Sea.

The measures in the new enviropackage include five nuclear power stations to be constructed over the next decade, and re-opening of three coal mines which were closed between 1983 and 1990. Two of the power stations will be in northern England and three in Scotland, where waste processing facilities (viz. the Irish Sea and the North Sea, respectively) are already at an advanced stage of development.

These measures constitute a "vital stage" in the transfer from fossil fuels to wind, wave and solar energy provision, the Prime Minister said. "Despite recent changes in weather patterns, the UK still does not have sufficient wind, waves or sun to make these more enviro-scrupulous energy sources commercially viable," he continued.

Although the technology for deriving energy from wind, water and the sun does exist, Britain does not as yet have the technology to take full advantage. In order to maintain energy consumption at its present level, for example, British windmills would require gale force winds to blow continuously in the same direction for five hundred days a year.

"It is true that - thanks to the policies of this Government - we now have more ferocious winds, higher waves and hotter sunshine than ever before in British history, but all these things are as yet too unpredictable and unreliable for a responsible government to consider them a proper source of the nation's energy," the Prime Minister said.

Consequently, Britain would need to continue hastening the process of climate change in order to provide the necessary weather conditions for windmills, water mills and solar panels to be a viable source of energy at some point in the next century.

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