Heathrow third runway to go ahead!

Apparently the Government is going to announce tomorrow that the third runway at Heathrow is to go ahead.

Bonkers. The road traffic around Heathrow already and the train links are very very bad indeed. Not only that but the quality of life for any one living in the area will go down the pan.

The BBC has this.

Bio Fuel duty set to rise by 20 per litre?

Alistair Darling gave the budget today, as expected.

His forecasts were somewhat more rosy than most independent commentators, and he did not do that much.

He did put up cigarettes, beer wine and spirits though, so the ferries are going to be busy.

The one thing he did not mention but is hidden away in the red book is the removal of the tax differential on bio fuels, worth something like 20p per litre, effective from 2010 where it will according to chapter 1, page 9, raise £550 million.

According to various other bits of the red book (See pages 7, 89, 95, and 107) this is all to encourage sustainable bio fuels, via the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation or RTFO. Hooray I hear you say! (Or not as the case may be). However the problem is there is no corresponding account of how much the RTFO will cost the treasury.

In short the government is either taking £550 million by ditching the tax differential on bio fuels, a very un green measure, or it is not accounting for the RTFO in which case the budget has got yet more dodgy figures in it.

Good eh?

Flood defence budget cut and cut again!

Whilst many parts of the country are suffering from flooding, in fact extremely severe flooding it is worth considering what if anything, the political backlash could be.

Over the last few years DEFRA, the Department for the Eradication of Farming and Rural Areas, has been in crisis because it has made a complete mess of the new farm payments system causing massive extra costs and fines.

The net result according to this article in last years Guardian is a cut to flood defences. What is worse is that according to this article in Ground Sure, of the 10th of July this year, the budget cuts are still going ahead.

What is more, we can't call in the armed services to help, because they are overstretched.

At times like this it does not take a genius to work out whwww.at sort of questions are going to come up at Prime ministers questions. Rather obviously Gordon Brown will therefore be prepared. I wonder how the follow up questions will go?

Hat tip to ColinW on politicalbetting.com for the links to the Guardian and Ground Sure.

Peak Oil in 4 years? Time to panic!

That well known political pamphlet that on the surface bears some resemblance to a real newspaper, and arguably the only newspaper published in this country, the Libdemograph (Formerly known as the Independent when it reported news and was independent, and indeed I used to buy it) reports that we are a short way of the doom and gloom of peak oil which will lead to much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Well, here is my take. Peak oil theory is rubbish, for one plain and simple reason. As demand surges, or supply seems restricted, the price rises and so more oil is available as it is more economic to extract.

There will be no recession like the 1970's after the Yom Kippur war that led the OPEC price rise of stunning proportions in such a short time.

Prices will rise, as they do other production methods will become viable and the price will stabilise. What will not happen is a jump from $9 a barrel to $40 a barrel in the space of a few days leading to recession.

What is more interesting is that at some point soon, it will be cheaper to grow oil than the drill for it. At that point the question will be where can I get land to grow oil for next to nothing. Then will follow the question how do I get fresh water to this hot and arid destination, when someone will work out that the solution is in the problem.

Save the Planet, Piss in the Sea!

One of the ways some scientists think may remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is increasing plankton, or to give them their full name, phytoplankton which absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen. Quite a lot of them are eaten by various forms of sea life, but those that die on their own then sink to the ocean floor, locking up the CO2.

That said, their is no point in relieving yourself in any part of the sea, it has to be in a desolate zone, where there is little or no plankton, because of a lack of the right nutrients for plankton to grow. It appears that nitrogen is one such, and urea, which is in urine is a good source that plankton can use.

The BBC has this, as well as 4 other ways to save the planet here, here, here and here.

It has to be said that my favourite way of saving the planet is to get Africa to grow our bio fuels as President Lula of Brazil suggested. There are a lot of people in Africa who can't make a living out of farming because the west dumps subsidised food on them which causes economic problems as well as stifling food production. With a demand for African produce this could all change.

Bio fuels to bring on the end of the world!

There have been a couple of reports on bio fuels recently giving warnings about the environmental damage they could cause.

Apparently they will starve the poor as the price of food goes up, lead to more widespread famines and cut down the rain forests all in one fell swoop, if we are not careful.

This all sounds perfectly plausible. However I am not convinced they are well thought through.

Firstly lets look at food pricing. In Europe food prices are distorted heavily upwards by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) making the poor pay more anyway, whilst the excess is then dumped on Africa so that Farmers there can't compete to grow their own food so starve. (America does similar in some agricultural sectors). The net result is that the poor can seldom afford food because they can't earn money farming.

If our farmers grew something useful and unsubsidised then I suspect the poor in Africa would be in a better position to earn a living and feed themselves. THE CAP and similar also play a part in causing famine by destroying native agriculture. In short a rise in food prices may help the poor as they will be the ones making money out if it. (I know this will not be universally the case but an economy generally starts by being able to feed itself before it can move on.)

Then there is the question of how much land bio fuels would need to use. Europe can already produce far in excess of what it needs to eat. The Ukraine could feed large parts of Europe on its own. The problem here is inefficient agriculture and growing things people do not want to buy.


That leaves the rain forests. There is no doubt that these are easy to exploit for agriculture, and that will require worldwide political pressure to stop. That said, that pressure should be sensitive to the fact that we are in effect punishing those who have still got their rain forests in favour of those who have already cut them down.

We should also be looking at what sort of technologies we can use to bring marginal land back into agricultural use. I am thinking here of the vast mass of desert that we have which is expanding at some rate.

These problems can be solved.

The BBC has this.

The Great Global Warming Swindle!

Yes its all a con! Well according to this program on Channel 4 it might be. I did not watch the actual program, but did catch a bit of the Newsnight discussion and have read the programs webpage.

The program lays out its arguments here.

I will make the following observations.

The program claims, here:

There is some evidence to suggest that the rise in carbon dioxide lags behind the temperature rise by 800 years and therefore can't be the cause of it.

This is a massive load of old tosh. Yes there may well be evidence to show that global temperature rises lead global carbon dioxide levels. I have no problem with that. What it shows it that global warming causes increased natural carbon dioxide emissions. It does not prove or disprove that carbon dioxide can cause global warming. For a bit of a discussion on how carbon dioxide heats the atmosphere see here.

The program claims here:

If greenhouse warming were happening, then scientists predict that the troposphere (the layer of the earth's atmosphere roughly 10-15km above us) should heat up faster than the surface of the planet, but data collected from satellites and weather balloons doesn't seem to support this.

Well, I'd like a bit of backing for this as a model. It does not seem to make sense to me. Most carbon dioxide emissions happen near the earths surface and carbon dioxide is heavier than air, just. Therefore it will stay low if it is generated low. The program does have some lovely pictures showing how carbon dioxide traps the suns rays by seemingly bouncing them back to earth. Well that's wrong, what happens is that carbon dioxide absorbs more heat. It does not bounce it anywhere.

So any sensible model would say the air with the most carbon dioxide in it gets the hottest (Well, OK methane generates more), and as it is heavier than air you would expect that to be closer to the ground.

However the program goes on, here with this:

For some people, the final nail in the coffin of human-produced greenhouse gas theories is the fact that carbon dioxide is produced in far larger quantities by many natural means: human emissions are miniscule in comparison. Volcanic emissions and carbon dioxide from animals, bacteria, decaying vegetation and the ocean outweigh our own production several times over.

One would hope it only took a small amount of thought to dismiss this argument. The natural environment both gives off and absorbs carbon dioxide. That is normal. It is in balance. As in fact is animals, bovine or otherwise farting. It happens and it has always happened. Nature copes.

The problem is not that human activity cause carbon dioxide to be produced, but where it comes from. generally it comes from fossil fuels which contain carbon that has been locked up for Milena. That adds carbon dioxide to the system faster than it is used to absorbing it, whilst crucially we reduce the ability of the environment to absorb that increase. This is where the problem comes.

Here there might be a point:

New evidence shows that that as the radiation coming from the sun varies (and sun-spot activity is one way of monitoring this) the earth seems to heat up or cool down. Solar activity very precisely matches the plot of temperature change over the last 100 years. It correlates well with the anomalous post-war temperature dip, when global carbon dioxide levels were rising.

Well, yes, but an unnatural increase in carbon dioxide concentrations does help the atmosphere absorb more heat. It is certainly the case that as the sun burns hotter so the earth gets hotter, but as I discussed here, that does not mean we can't do anything about it, nor does it mean that climate change models have ignored it.

Mind you there does need to be a debate and discussion. There can be no room for theological positions on this and we do not need a Mary Whitehouse of the climate change debate.

Whitehall fails Environment

People everywhere are being encouraged to reduce their environmental impact, and quite right too. This year has been fairly easy, as the winter has been milder this year than last and I re insulated my hot water tank. As a result of this I have used two thirds of the gas that I used last year.

It appears government has not fared so well. Figures are not available for 2006/7 but they are for 2004/5 and 2005/6. They make some grim reading. (See The Sustainable Development Commission, and their report here)

Progress has been made in places. For example Whitehall is recycling 8% more. What is worrying is that it is at the same time sending more to landfill. So rather than working on reduce, reuse recycle they appear to be working on just the recycle bit.

What concerns me more though is that across Whitehall as a whole carbon emissions are up. That is not the fuel bill, but carbon emissions. For example in the Department for the Eradication of Farming and Rural Areas (DEFRA) run by David Milliband, carbon emissions are up by 10.2% since 1990, as opposed to a target of a reduction of 12.5% by 2010/11. This is in fact also an increase on the previous year. This is clearly the wrong direction of travel. Mind you the DTI seems to be doing quite well.

When there are now many ways of reducing carbon emissions like more efficient cars, traveling less, video conferencing and turning off the lights when no one is there.

One of the most shocking things I saw when Newsnight ran a report on this, was the number of offices in Whitehall where the lights were on well into the night when there was no one there. You have to wonder whether they were heated as well, and more importantly which nutter thinks it is OK to leave the lights on when there is no one there?

You can read the BBC report here, and more on the environment here.

The Independent's big lie on bio fuels

On Monday, as I was preparing to go the the Adam Smith Institute bash in London the Libdemograph, formerly the Independent, published a front page article with the headline "The Big Green Fuel Lie" and a leading article to accompany it, which is here.

I will deal with the trite nonsense published on the front page. It gives bio fuels a hard time, on 3 grounds.

Brazil produces its own from sugar cane, which involves burning off the cane in the field causing localised particulate air pollution.

Brazil may have cut down lots of rain forest to do so.

The vast sugar cane estates limit biodiversity.

Well, you don't need to do any of that to grow biofuels, so all we are arguing about is production methods.

The article then goes on to say:

While Brazil's tropical climate allows it to source alcohol from its sugar crop, the US has turned to its industrialised corn belt for the raw material to substitute oil. The American economist Lester R Brown, from the Earth Policy Institute, is leading the warning voices: "The competition for grain between the world's 800 million motorists who want to maintain their mobility and its two billion poorest people who are simply trying to stay alive is emerging as an epic issue."

This of course shows the utter ignorance of Independent journalists. They have not asked for example, what the role of dumping subsidised American and European agricultural crops on the third world has on food production there, and indeed whether or not it does in part cause poverty amongst agricultural classes. In short there is no money in farming in large parts of agriculture which is the sort of work that a lot of people can get. If the price of local produce were to rise, because we stopped dumping on them it would seriously help.

However the leader makes some odd assertions as well. For example:

Sadly, that's not enough. Ethanol may sound like the kind of "friendly" energy the world has been waiting for. But for ethanol production to rise to the levels Mr Bush is hoping for, huge amounts of the world's remaining forests will have to be cut down and turned over to corn or sugar cane.

No, that is rubbish. For a start in the UK and indeed other parts of the Eu we are paying farmers set aside money, virtually not to farm, whilst countries like the Ukraine can feed itself and Europe to the west. There is no need to cut down anything more. However rationalising the Common agricultural policy is a must.

The existing hectarage devoted to agriculture will not be remotely large enough to produce the quantity of fuel needed. In other words, paradoxically, a growing reliance of renewable energy may accelerate the destruction of the rainforests we so desperately need to moderate the planet's temperature.

Like above, it assumes we carry on growing rubbish we won't buy at taxpayers expense which then gets dumped in Africa making sure their farming does not work either. What is more it cites no studies or any other useful way of checking that nonsense.

Besides, according to the World Conservation Union, growing corn uses far more energy than the finished fuel produces.

Sorry are they saying that a tractor uses more fuel working a field to get fuel from it, or is this an argument against using fossil fuel derived fertaliser to grow non fossil fuel? Clearly there is little point in doing the latter, whilst the former is rather obvious nonsense otherwise Brazil would be a

There is another downside to the ethanol boom. As demand rises, the price of the cereals from which it is partly made soars as well. Tortilla prices in Mexico are already surging as a result of ethanol demand in America. This threatens the precarious livelihoods of many of the world's poorest people.

Actually not necessarily so. It gives people more chance of earning a living from farming, and a good agricultural economy is where most prosperity starts.

London's £8 baby tax!

Various people have been commenting on Ken Livingston's extension of London's congestion charge to cover the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

For example Iain Dale has this article citing issues like a reduction in business for traders and shops in Kensington and Chelsea as well as the fact that a large number of residents of that borough will now be able to congest the city center with out extra cost, thereby spreading congestion.

There have been protests as well including go slows. Local traders will not only be hit by their customers paying the charge but could well have problems traversing the congestion charge borders. Will jobs be lost?

However there is another problem and it is this. Kensington and Chelsea contains a major hospital, The Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, whose catchment area contains Hammershith and Fulham. So if someone in Hammersmith or Fulham needs to drop a baby, and has to be driven in to the hospital, that's £8. If they have not planed in advance and booked, and don't pay on time the charges mount.

In short, this is going to end up look like a regressive tax on the poor, and is going to be full of unintended consequences.

Fortunately for me I don't live in London and no longer drive there.

For more information see this press release.

Judge slams sham nuclear consultation

Well, I was quite interested to hear that a judge in the High Court has ordered that the consultation over whether or not we should have nuclear power to be done again. In a damming indictment of the process the judge labeled it as amongst other things, misleading, seriously flawed and procedurally unfair.

Tony Blair's reaction? he said:

"this won't affect the policy at all"

So the consultation will come to the same conclusion.

Fantastic. Another sham consultation. I can just see green peace preparing their next Judicial Review as clearly the government has not got the idea that the point of a consultation is to listen, not just provide a forum for whingers which you then ignore.

I wonder how much tax payers money is wasted on these sham consultations?

The BBC has this here.

Road Pricing Petition, we're all stupid Apparently!

I have just read this most excellent Fisking, by Dizzy thinks, of a gibbering fool, Steve Richards, who wrote this article in today's Libdemograph Independent.

The Fisking is very good, I suggest you read it. However what irritates me most is the silly arguments about the road pricing scheme and why the petition should be ignored. Firstly Steve "let them eat cake" Richards isn't bothered about the poor being priced off the roads as he can get where he wants to go quicker. Fantastic. Pratt.

Then there is all the nonsense that the petition only got over a million signatures because of a scare mongering "viral" email. Tosh. I oppose road pricing because it is a regressive tax on the poor. I did not get the email, so my vote was not on the basis of what was in it.

However, unless the plan is to erect toll booths on every road in the land, then data is going to have to be gathered on where people travel, in order to send in a bill. This information will be in the hands of the state. They may not misuse it yet, but that is no guarantee that it won't be misused in the future.

We keep hearing of looking for suspects on the basis of profiling, and indeed looking to "prevent" crimes being committed by people who have no criminal record. What with all your data in officialdom being gathered in a central database and your every car journey being tracked, it won't take long before people have restrictions placed upon them because their "profile" suggests they might commit a criminal offence.

I have also written this on road pricing, whilst I wrote this on ID cards.

Road Pricing Petition, I have signed, have you?

There is much in the news about the anti road pricing petition which has got over a million signatories, and the government is set to ignore.

I have signed, and I urge anyone who has not to do the same.

I have signed it because I have the following objections to the scheme.

• It is a very regressive tax hitting the poorest hardest, particularly in rural areas where having a car is almost mandatory, particularly if you have a young family.
• It is technically complex and will not doubt cost a lot to implement, over run any budgets set for it and not quite work as intended.
• It is far too intrusive into peoples daily lives allowing government to know where people are all the time they are using their cars.
• If it were about green issues then you need to tax people on the fossil carbon people use, and you can do that by increasing the fuel duty on fossil fuels (whilst reducing the tax on bio fuels)

If you want to sign the petition you can sign it here.

The Telegraph has this on ministers ignoring the petition here whilst the Times has this. Let us try and get this up to two million signatures!

Does Ken Livingstone want gridlock in London?

Well, possibly according to this press release from Hammersmith and Fulham Council, and possibly not according to this one from The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone's office.

At the heart of the issue is the fact that London is running out of landfill sites, and will have them filled by around 2010. That is 3 years away at most.

It is clear from the press release from Ken Livingstone that he is very much against incineration. His press release bangs on and on about fantastic green ways of dealing with rubbish, including turning it into bio gas, recovering heat from it (How? cooling when it is composting? surely not? In Northern Europe you generally have to heat this sort of stuff to get the right temperatures to produce bio gas and decent compost).

All well and good. Those nasty Tories at Hammersmith and Fulham Council, together with The Western Riverside Waste Authority should be ashamed of themselves!

The problem with all of this is that at it's very heart this looks like a power grab by Red Ken to get more power for his office. He thinks London needs an overarching waste authority, reporting to him of course. He would like a bill going through parliament now amended to give him that power, the Greater London Authority Bill. So at least we know his motivation.

Ken is right that councils are not using the "latest" emerging technologies to deal with waste, but that is because they have not yet been run on a sufficiently large scale and need development. If there were a budget for developing renewable energy from waste on a large scale that would be good.

So what does London do when it runs out of landfill? Well if the incinerator at Bexely isn't built it will have to be shipped out in 100,000 trucks causing yet more traffic in London.

In any case the incinerator planned is one which will generate electricity for a medium sized town so is in many ways a green way of dealing with waste.

That is the problem. Even if the GLA bill were modified it is very doubtful that Red Ken could have some alternative means of waste disposal available in the time. If he has some proposal up his sleeve he should say so.

Please note, the Hammersmith and Fulham Council is not yet on the web, I will add a link as soon as I can.

Vote early vote often- Consumer Action and the Environment

I heard that Environment Minister Ben Bradshaw has had a meeting with supermarkets about waste packaging. You can read a brief report from the BBC here.

The supermarkets have been making noises about this quite a lot. That however seems to about cover it. Noises.

Some environmental groups seem to think that only regulation will bring big business to heal. The problem with this is that you get cumbersome regulations that cost money and are frequently not up to date.

We as consumers vote every time we open our wallets. Big business is in this to make money, and if we alter our "voting" patterns they will notice.

Take this one example. Cauliflowers. I saw Sainsbury's selling small extra trimmed cauliflowers in clear plastic boxes. Bizarre. They seem to have removed natures packaging in favour of some plastic. The same is true of cabbages. They grow prepacked. No need for more.

Paper bags are easier to recycle and whats more are better for the veg.

So when we see dopey behaviour, lets act.

We can refuse to buy over packed products, we can call management over every time we see something that stupid and complain. Maybe even make a scene. Write letters. Bring back excess packaging next time you visit, and leave it in the foyer.

Concerted consumer action can make a difference and get things moving quicker. If business is hit in the pocket it will change, and fast.

Carbon Dioxide emissions and the environment

Just wanted to clear something up just so there are no misconceptions in the green debate.

According to the Fascist Mail on Sunday David "Look at my lovely face" Milliband is proposing to tax on green issues until the pips squeak. This will hurt the poor more than the rich, the rural poor doubly so. You can read their article here. Us conservatives need to come up with better answers.

However when we talk of Carbon emissions we should be clear on what it is we mean.

If you did up some coal, or drill for some oil, and burn it you are releasing fossilised carbon. That results in higher concentrations of CO2 in the environment, and as I said in this article, it absorbs heat more than air does so the atmosphere gets hotter.

However, that does not mean that carbon based fuels are in any way bad, if they come from plants that have removed carbon from the atmosphere first.

Also from an environmental point of view it is nuts to scrap all the cars we have in favour of new ones, if we can find non fossil based fuels to run them on. Well they do exist. Cars can be adjusted, but more interestingly you can mix bio fuels with fossil fuels to get net carbon emissions down NOW. The only problem is, you may have to reduce tax on something.

Hat tip to Dizzy who also has a good article on the subject here.

Global warming - Is it really happening?

Stop laughing at the back!

The problem with discussing global warming is that it almost immediately becomes theological.

In fact I can already see some in the environmental lobby preparing to burn me at the stake. Obviously they will only use wood from sustainable forests which encourage bio diversity that has not been transported too far.

A few days ago I came across this by Luboš Motl and this by Iain Dale.

There is clearly a lot more we do not know about global warming than we do.

The first article by Luboš Motl goes on about how global warming does not seem to be happening in the Southern hemisphere, while Ian Dale queried David Miliband's numbers on CO2 levels. These two things could be easily explained. The differing data on the Southern hemisphere may be because CO2 levels there are lower, and the differing CO2 numbers can also be explained because CO2 levels vary by time of year and region.

We hear so many things on the subject from "Were all doomed!" so we might as well not bother to "it's a myth" and all of it in either theological or ideological terms. That is not way to deal with a serious scientific matter.

Still lets try and look at it sensibly:

• Is the world warming up?
• If it is, is it man made or is the sun burning hotter?
• Is there anything we can do?
• Could global warming be a good thing?
  

Is the world warming up?

Well it looks like it is. We have had a series of hot summers, and it seems some glaciers are melting. However the planet is not as hot as it has been in the past.

Is it man made, or could the sun be getting hotter?

Possibly, or rather probably. Scientists think it is man made because they have been looking at CO2 emissions and concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere. CO2 absorbs more heat from sunlight than either oxygen or nitrogen does, so the more of it there is about the more heat the atmosphere absorbs from sunlight. You can try an experiment at home. Get two similar clear plastic bottles and have one with only air in it, and fill the other with CO2, then put a thermometer in both and put them in the sun. The one with mostly CO2 will get a lot warmer a lot quicker.

CO2 levels also vary by season, and place as levels of consumption and production vary by economic activity and plant growth.

Could the sun be getting hotter?

Well, it could be. I don't think we know enough about the cycles of the sun to be able to be anything like conclusive. The question is surely so what?

The planet would be ice bound with out any CO2, so it follows that our behaviour can positively affect the state of our planet. If we take the right actions not only could we stop the rise in green house gasses but we could also reverse them, making up for the increase in temperature of the sun, if it is in fact happening.

Could global warming be a good thing?

In Roman times it is said they used to grow grapes as far north as Northumberland. So some places may look set to benefit, however at the same time Libya used to be the bread basket of the Roman empire and global warming won't bring that back.

It is clear that the world has both warmed and cooled over time, but generally this has happened fairly slowly. What we have here seems to me to be far too rapid. Mankind will definitely survive, but much could be lost, including a lot of people. Also the hunt to secure resources could end up in many expensive wars.

Lastly, the thing about global warming is that there will always be evidence pointing one way or another, and theories to explain how it is or is not happening. If we wanted to be rigorous we would arrange some sort of control experiment. Unfortunately we only have the one planet on which to do it. We therefor have to look at the balance of probabilities. We are only going to get one chance to get it right. More importantly fossil fuels are a finite resource, so we may as well develop the technologies to live without cheap fossil fuels now.

I will write an article on green taxes another day.

Hydrogen will save us from global warming!

According to George Monbiot on BBC2's Newsnight last night. He even suggested we could have a pipeline network for hydrogen.

Well, its rubbish.

It is true that hydrogen does exist in abundance both on earth and in the solar system. The problem is that it mostly exists as parts of other compounds such as water, methane and indeed all organic compounds. The only large source of free hydrogen close by I know of is the sun, and I am reliably informed that its a bit hot there!

So given that it does not exist on its own on earth, can it be used as a fuel?

No, because you have to put at least the same amount of energy into extracting it from water as you will get back turning it back into water. You can extract it from methane, but you are either using a fossil fuel or if you are using bio gas, why bother? Why not just use the gas?

What hydrogen may well be useful as is as an energy store. You have spare energy, turn it into hydrogen and oxygen (from water) ship the hydrogen to where you want to use it, and get water back. (They do this on Shetland with wind energy, using spare energy to produce hydrogen which then can be used to generate electricity when there is no wind and to drive cars).

However let us not think that hydrogen will save us from anything. It won't. What will is renewable energies such as wind and solar, as well as bio fuels. There is an article on wikipedia about the hydrogen economy here.

The way for ward for energy

Today saw a partial release of what is in the Conservative party's energy review paper. You can read the BBC report here.

It seems to me to follow in a similar vein to our policy at the last general election (Which when I saw Tim Yeo MP on Newsnight he had clearly not read) in that it puts nuclear last.

What it is looking to do is to create an environment in which many technologies can flourish, and then to some extent the market will decide which ones fair best.

The advantage of this approach is that we have no idea which technologies will work best, particularly as someone may come up with new ideas and new thinking.

As an example of the old thinking I remember when I saw a Not the Nine O'clock news feature on a solar powered torch. How ridiculous can you get? However someone oblivious to the obvious ridicule came up with solar powered garden lights.

Tony Blair's key man in the "Blue sky thinking" department was Lord Birt, renowned amongst many Private Eye readers. In the last few years Tony Blair seems to have become enthused by Nuclear power as a solution. He now appears to want to railroad it through.

So what is the problem.

Well, there are a number of issues with nuclear power and I don't pretend to present an exhaustive list, but in my view they are:

• Cost of decommissioning.
• Long term waste handling.
• The apparent requirement for fixed pricing.

Other people will cite safety and terrorism as well.

The first two could well end up lumbering the tax payer with a "stealth tax" as the Liberal Democrat Leader Sir Menzies Campbell has pointed out. The third also falls into this category, but is worse than that because it will serve to stifle new technologies competing to get market share even if they are much better.

That said you can't rule out Nuclear for all time, but we do need to work much harder at renewables.

Just some random thoughts on that matter. Every year around Christmas Thames Water remove 7000 tons of turkey fat from its sewers. This gives them a large waste disposal problem. Were that turned into energy it would be the equivalent of 60 MILLION miles worth of diesel to power a van.

Other silly things. Whilst the rest of Europe still use the tallow gained from rendering one cow to provide the energy to render the next we have implemented a European regulation is such a way as to define the tallow as a waste product (rather than a by product which it in fact is) so that they can't do that any more.

On another note the sun delivers enough energy to the surface of the earth in 1 minute to power the world for a year. You can store solar energy in a heat store rather than as electricity in batteries, and in fact some large scale solar projects are in development that work this way.