PowerSwitch

The Telegraph - 25/02/10

The Tories must rescue Britain's energy policy after years of dangerous neglect, says Benedict Brogan.

Article continues ...

We face a looming crisis that has inescapable parallels with the banking disaster that nearly brought the world's money system to a halt. Just as cash machines nearly stopped giving out cash, so we face a time when no electricity will come out of the socket. Unless the next government takes rapid, decisive and far-sighted action, the result will be catastrophic. As with the banks, we can see the disaster coming. Energy is too big to fail.

biffvernon wrote:I'm not defending the present government's energy policy but the structure of our energy industry was set up during Thatcher's years. To blame Labour, with the implication that the Tories would have done better, is nonsense.

clv101 wrote:

biffvernon wrote:I'm not defending the present government's energy policy but the structure of our energy industry was set up during Thatcher's years. To blame Labour, with the implication that the Tories would have done better, is nonsense.

I don't agree with that.

biffvernon wrote:

clv101 wrote:

biffvernon wrote:I'm not defending the present government's energy policy but the structure of our energy industry was set up during Thatcher's years. To blame Labour, with the implication that the Tories would have done better, is nonsense.

I don't agree with that.

Hang on - I think we are in complete agreement. I said:
The Tories set up the structure.
I'm not defending Labour (they have been as bad as you describe).
Blame Labour by all means - but don't for a moment think that had the Tories been in power they would have done any better.

Yet the industry complains – with justification – that Labour has done nothing. It dragged its feet on nuclear, has done nothing to deliver on clean coal technology, and has set targets for renewables that insiders say privately are pure fantasy.

"In 1990, Margaret Thatcher urged us to "remember our duty to nature before it is too late."" There you are, straight from the Dragon's mouth. We are part of a web of life on this small, finite planet.

And before you brand me as a bearded, loony lefty, I am a life long Conservative who has stood for the party in local elections. There is nothing unconservative about wanting to pass on a viable business to one's children. In this case the viable business is our finite home, the planet.

Most of you haven't noticed that our long period of world economic growth has come to the point of the graph where it kicks upward at a steep angle and heads for the stratosphere. What am I talking about? Exponential growth, not linear growth.

Linear growth is a nice and simple 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. and is easily understandable. Unfortunately the way our economy grows is exponential. It goes 1, 2, 4, 8,... 32768, 65536, ...1048576, 2097152, etc. At a certain point the increases start to get very large indeed. We have reached that point now.

As our economies are growing we are using very large amounts of resources every year. The Chinese economy, growing at 10% per year, doubles the resources it uses every 7 years. In a few years it has gone from being an insignificant importer of oil to, very soon, importing more oil than the USA. It has done the same with uranium, coal , steel, copper, even food and many other of the world's finite resources. That increase in resource use was increasing commodity prices world wide before the recession. Although the rate has slowed with the recession, China is still growing at a very fast rate.

Chinese buyers have been touring the world with their vaults full of soon to be worthless dollars buying up resources at prices that the West can't afford to match. Greedy governments have been grabbing the worthless greenbacks to stuff into Swiss bank vaults.

Why have the Chinese been doing this? Because they know that their relentless growth is going to cause a massive resource supply crisis in the very near future. That crisis will cover all fuels including uranium, all ores and many food products because we can no longer get the stuff out of the ground quickly enough. We have used all the easily extractable resources and are now on the scrapings. This crisis could come in five to ten years, depending on when we come out of recession and start using in earnest again.

What has all this to do with our energy blackout? Everything. If we rely on anything which has to be purchased abroad we will be stuffed because prices will rise to levels we can't afford. North Sea oil has paid our way in the world in recent years, followed by banking. The oil is depleting at 6% per year meaning we have to import to keep demand supplied. That makes a 12% per year negative difference to our balance of payments. And banking is stuffed as well, as some may have noticed. We are just waiting for the world to notice that we are up the creek without a paddle.

Our only option is to invest any money we can get our hands on in energy conservation. If we spent some of the money that we gave to the banks on a massive building insulation program to reduce the energy inputs by 70 to 80%, quite possible as a couple of my recent projects have shown, and reduced both the number of vehicle movements and their speed, we could reduce our oil and gas imports by a large percentage. The gas could be used to provide a buffer of electricity generation while we reduced demand and increased all forms of renewable generation to the much lower level of new demand.

In order to stop the inflationary pressure from the government spend on the insulation program the tax on heating fuel could be increased, without any extra expense to the user, to pay for the that program. We would then come out of recession with a very much reduced energy requirement, a legacy of extremely well insulated buildings, which would last us for hundreds of years, and virtually no fuel poverty.

There is no point in building dozens of nuclear power plants because in a few years time the fuel will be unaffordable and unavailable, just as oil, gas and coal will be. Unfortunately for the younger readers, the next twenty years cannot be the same as the last twenty. We cannot keep increasing growth, and therefore wealth, because there are not the available resources at the old cheap prices to do it. Any resources in the future will be far more expensive and there are countries in the world that are better placed, with lower costs, to be able to afford them.

All empires come to an end, historical fact, as ours did after WW2, and the oil based US Dollar empire is on its way out after only 60 or so years. The new empire will be in the east, because they are buying the resources to build it, but it is doubtful how long that will last because those required resources are dwindling very fast. Instead of looking for Business as Usual we must look to retrenchment and ways to make our poverty acceptable.

A much shorter working week and more time spent in the fresh air, with my family, growing our own vegetables sounds very acceptable to me. Think about it before replying.

(Sits back and waits for explosion)

kenneal wrote:Just posted this on the Telegraph site. Don't know if they will put it up though.
...
Some of that is from Chris Martenson's talk to APPGOPO this week, some from elsewhere, often Powerswitch.

clv101 wrote: Given how badly Labour have done with reference to the European mean - I think it's fair to say that a different party in power would have done better. That's all.