Government to renege on renewable energy targets shocker!

Apparently according to this article in today's Guardian this Labour government is going to renege on its renewable energy targets, because it feels they are both expensive and impractical. Well, the way Labour do anything, getting out of bed in the morning looks impractical.

Climate change sceptics aside, and indeed all their arguments, the stark reality is that we are already behind India and the USA, despite the fact that we have potentially good opportunities in renewable energy. The problem here is as always a useless government.

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.

Brown on the Environment

Gordon Brown is giving a speech on climate change today to the Green Alliance. In it I suspect he will highlight Ukrainian tractor production and bore people stiff.

However he will also seek to trash George Osbourne's announcement on taxing air travel.

The Conservative party's position on air travel seems to be this:

We need to cut the growth in air travel because it is the fastest area of growth in green house gases.

The Conservative party are issuing a consultation process, that is about to start and has not yet even finished.

The bones of the consultation are these:

Air travel within the UK will be subject to VAT. (Given that tampons and sanitary towels are I can't see this as controversial, after all you could catch a train, but I dread to think what the alternatives are for "sanitary products", I think air travel is a bit more of a luxury especially as I have to pay VAT on the fuel I put in my car, but apparently it might be.)

Individuals will get a personal air travel allowance, on which either they will not be taxed, or at least they will not be taxed any more.

Taxes will be aimed at the dirtiest engines.

People traveling above and beyond their personal allowance will pay a higher rate of tax on air travel.

All the extra tax raised with this tax will be taken off other taxes. So for every billion raised will be used to reduce tax elsewhere.

Now going back to Gordon's speech to the Green Alliance. In it Gordon will criticise the Conservative position thus:

"Changes must be considered, costed, credible and consumer friendly not ill-conceived, short-termist, unworkable and unfair."

Well let us consider his critique:

I wont go into whether it is costed, it is after all a consultation paper, it does have to be credible, and if Gordon can highlight how it is not credible, lets here it.

Consumer friendly? Well the idea here is to reduce consumption surely?

Short termist? Umm? What like reducing tax on air travel one year and then increasing it a few years later on the grounds you now want to save the planet? Oh, and failing to pass the relevant legislation to make it legal whilst just using the money to will the treasuries coffers?

Unworkable? I am not sure Gordon has carried out a full analysis of how these proposals will work, largely because the consultation paper has not been published. Clearly he is talking nonsense.

Unfair? In what way exactly?

Currently Gordon Brown is either just raising yet another stealth tax with is currently illegal hike in airport taxes or his aim is to raise airport taxes to such a level as to reduce demand.

Airport tax at the moment is per journey. So if you raise the tax to stop some people flying the first to suffer will be the poor who will be taxed put of air travel all together. Is that fair? No.

On the other hand the Conservative proposals will allow everyone some tax free flights and aim to hit the more frequent and presumably wealthy fliers. Looks a lot fairer to me.

Mind you I don't suppose it will help that Director of the Green Alliance, Stephen Hale has said "the Conservatives' proposals on aviation fuel would take them ahead of where the government are at present, if they see it through."

You can read the BBC's report here.

The shame of it all is of course that Gordon, and indeed the Labour party could have waited to see more detailed proposals, but instead just wishes to be combative.

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.

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.

Government Ministers pay to bury bad smell

Well, according to the Sunday Telegraph here and here, the government is looking to offset it's vast carbon emissions from flights by carbon offsetting. A process described by some as like paying the RSPCA and then beating your pet.

Tony Blair may be right that science may well have the answer to global warming, but that is not by mitigating ones sins through paying the pardoner it is by finding alternative ways of producing energy, of which there are many.

However what appears to be going on is that as part of the scheme the government's offsetting policy is to bury some vegetable waste in Thailand and then use the methane gas to provide electricity to the plant producing the vegetable waste. If they did not do this, it would stink. Methane is odourless (Must tick off ignorant Telegraph journalist, methane does not smell to such a huge extent that natural gas has a smell added to it to let you know when there is a leak) but the process of decomposition often produces other gasses such as the rotten egg smell of hydrogen sulphide. (You also get this smell in river estuary mud due to anaerobic bacteria)

Well good. The government is doing two good things. It is preventing methane getting into the atmosphere, and by turning into electricity, is also reducing carbon emissions. Double gin and tonics all round!

However I will make a couple of observations.

Firstly you don't have to go to Thailand to get roting vegetables (John Prescott anyone). I appreciate that many would like to throw them at Labour politicians, however we as a country dispose of vast quantities of organic material a year which can be turned into methane (after removal of hydrogen sulphide and carbon dioxide) that could be fed into the gas grid or used to generate electricity.


Secondly, if you produced the energy here, you could sell it here, and as you are saving land fill tax, get paid to take the waste away and paid for the energy and compost produced, so the carbon offset would be both cheaper, and more beneficial to our economy.

So nice try David Milliband, if you were doing a GCSE I would give you a C, if you were doing anything more, I would have to say "must try harder to think in a joined up coherent way"

Pre Budget Report, early comments

It's going to take some time to come up with a considered opinion on this one. The news papers have done a lot of work on this and financial journalists will have done lots of work on this before hand. You can read the report yourself here.

Two things strike me. Firstly the language is so obviously partisan like Gordon howling his rubbish from the very pages you read, rather than the dry report report that I was expecting. The other is the ever increasing Public Sector borrowing requirement, which has risen above forecast and is rising as a percentage of GDP. According to the report it will continue to rise until 2010 when it seems that they claim it will level off at 38.4% of GDP.

Gordon Brown has made much of his so called prudence. I can't see it here. If you still need to increase borrowing after 57 continuous quarters of growth you are either not collecting enough tax or you are spending too much.

The amusing this is why the hole in the public finances is getting bigger though. It is because of lower than expected tax revenues. Gordon always seems to get his growth forecasts right (though he sets the estimate and as Vince Cable said yesterday, marks the paper) he always seems to over estimate the tax take. Perhaps the growth figures are just wrong?

Also oil companies investment in the North Sea seems to be down since they had a massive windfall tax slapped on them. Never mind the years of risk taking to get the oil or the times when oil has been only just profitable to produce in the North Sea, make a healthy profit for the risk then you get slapped with a tax. Shame Gordon can't do that to the PFI firm who owns the treasury buildings, they are in a tax haven!

Of course green taxes as a percentage of the tax take are still way less under the Conservatives, but then what did you expect.

India 6th largest investor in renewable energy ahead of UK!

This was a surprising fact to come out of watching Newsnight tonight with Jeremy Paxman going over the Stern report (which I will comment on when I have had a chance to read it)

I can't remember what the Indian representative s name was, but it seems to me to be a startling fact that we are investing so little that we come BELOW 6th, and that India which has many more problems to deal with is ahead of us.

That goes to show just how ineffective this government has been. It talks lots on the environment but does not seem any thing like as committed to it as the previous Conservative government.

I regret to say that Newsnight wheeled out Nigel Lawson who seems to be an ardent climate change denier. No mention of the fact that much of the ground work for global climate change treaties was under a Conservative government and that Mrs Thatcher was a early evangelist dealing with climate change on the global stage.

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.