Energy is a Power Game

[raspberry-blower]

Part 1 of a tour de force on Britain's "energy policy" from The Automatic Earth.

First, a bit as to the reasoning behind some of the more questionable decisions made:

But Cameron and his guys have bets going on more horses in the energy dash, and if there is one common thread to be found here, it seems to be one that touches on the kind of megalomania which dictates that short term -political - gains are considered more important than what any of this will mean to the British people over time. As far as I can see, it's either that or Cameron et al are really dumb. Which I don't think they are. What you see is that their priorities are simply not in line with the best interest of the British people, and they don't care about that. They seek short term popularity and when they have that, it's used it to hand over large amounts of public money to private industries, preferably with long term binding contracts that will still have to be paid off when they themselves are long gone.

So they've all got their noses in the trough. No change there, then.

Then we get the ever escalating price of new nuclear - a few words for Ed Davey:

That takes the grand prize: the same energy minister caught lying about citizens' energy bills just about the very moment the words left his lips, in the very next moment claims to know that the price those same citizens will have to fork over to a foreign company to keep their lights on 35 years from now, represents "fair value". He has no idea, isn't that clear enough, he's just moving his lips. How insane does this have to get before this guy is sentenced to spend the rest of his days on the isle of Elba? Or does he escape that fate only because his boss is even worse?

There are a few choice words for those who think that fast breeders will "save the day" and also to George Monbiot.

Part 1 ends:

And I'll leave you with a - perhaps deeply philosophical - question: Are we going to be done in by a lack of energy, or by our desperate chase for more of it? When Monbiot says: " ... if transport and heating are to be powered by low-carbon electricity, total demand is likely to rise even with the most parsimonious use of energy.", my first thought is: that doesn't sound too smart. Demand may rise, but that doesn't mean anything if supply does not. If there's less supply, we'll be forced to transport less and heat less.

And whether or not that's disastrous depends to a large extent on how we design our societies. The way things are going right now, it's obvious disaster will be upon us if we have less energy at our disposal. But if we don't demand our food to come from 5000 miles away and our clothes from 10,000, and we don't all need a car to drive us 100 miles every day to get to work and to the mall, then perhaps we can pause the mad dash for more. And not build conventional nukes or chase breeder or thorium pipedreams. The desire for such things is only there because we have this urge to maximize our energy use (ever looked at how that went up in the past 50 years? ever wondered why?), an urge we inherited from our distant ancestors, yeast and amoeba. Doesn't mean we have to act on that urge. Come to think of it, maybe this is our chance to prove once and for all that we're smarter than yeast. It's all about which part of the brain prevails.

Then again, maybe the real problem is that energy is power, and so energy is a power game, and we can't stop playing. Maybe it's inevitable that for the shit that floats to the top of our societies, it's very clear which part of the brain prevails.

Energy is a Power Game: Part 1

Will post up part 2 (unless someone gets there ahead of me )