Windy Rhetoric
Since the Lower Miliband has committed whatever Government is in power in twelve years' time to finding an excuse as to why it couldn't be done, the Observer has decided to help out a bit on this business of generating fifteen per cent of our energy from renewable sources by 2020.
Despite the Glorious Successor's airy commitment to clean coal and sustainable uranium, it appears that we might have one or two problems expanding our wind power because "there is a severe shortage of engineers and companies are reviewing their commitments to wind energy because of spiralling costs"; and it is not at all clear that we can train enough out-of-work bankers, marketing executives, stockbrokers and other recipients of the taxpayer's largesse to make good the shortage in the time we have left. There is "a growing conviction that the plans were rushed through so quickly by the government" - well, there's a surprise - "that it will now take substantial new money and guarantees to work" - money which the Government has doubtless already earmarked for worthier projects, such as the national identity database, the replacement for Trident and the Olympics. There is also considerable opposition to land-based windfarms from the kind of people who have not yet grasped the fact that you can have an overcrowded society of greedy and wasteful human beings, or you can have a beautiful landscape, but that it can sometimes be difficult to sustain both at the same time. Given that Gordon Brown has claimed that Britain is a world leader in renewabilitising its national energy supply, it should come as no surprise that "Texas alone plans more wind power than is expected to be installed in Britain in the next 20 years"; that "China plans 100GW of wind power by 2020, a ten-fold increase from today"; and that prices for the necessary technology, where we seem to have missed the bus as usual, are heading rapidly upwards.
It was once observed of a previous government that, on an island virtually made of coal and surrounded by fish, they had somehow managed to achieve a coal shortage and a fish shortage at the same time. The Glorious Successor seems well on the way to achieving shortages of wind power in the British climate and shortages of solar power in the face of global warming. Perhaps he really is a miracle worker, after all.
Despite the Glorious Successor's airy commitment to clean coal and sustainable uranium, it appears that we might have one or two problems expanding our wind power because "there is a severe shortage of engineers and companies are reviewing their commitments to wind energy because of spiralling costs"; and it is not at all clear that we can train enough out-of-work bankers, marketing executives, stockbrokers and other recipients of the taxpayer's largesse to make good the shortage in the time we have left. There is "a growing conviction that the plans were rushed through so quickly by the government" - well, there's a surprise - "that it will now take substantial new money and guarantees to work" - money which the Government has doubtless already earmarked for worthier projects, such as the national identity database, the replacement for Trident and the Olympics. There is also considerable opposition to land-based windfarms from the kind of people who have not yet grasped the fact that you can have an overcrowded society of greedy and wasteful human beings, or you can have a beautiful landscape, but that it can sometimes be difficult to sustain both at the same time. Given that Gordon Brown has claimed that Britain is a world leader in renewabilitising its national energy supply, it should come as no surprise that "Texas alone plans more wind power than is expected to be installed in Britain in the next 20 years"; that "China plans 100GW of wind power by 2020, a ten-fold increase from today"; and that prices for the necessary technology, where we seem to have missed the bus as usual, are heading rapidly upwards.
It was once observed of a previous government that, on an island virtually made of coal and surrounded by fish, they had somehow managed to achieve a coal shortage and a fish shortage at the same time. The Glorious Successor seems well on the way to achieving shortages of wind power in the British climate and shortages of solar power in the face of global warming. Perhaps he really is a miracle worker, after all.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home