When politicians and advertisers and propagandists want to do something to persuade us that a policy or product or idea is something new, because the old policy, product or idea has failed, they re-invent vocabulary and assign new meanings to words in the hope of fooling us into thinking that the policies, products and ideas are new, whereas it is only the words that are new or used in a different context.

So instead of a settlement negotiation we have a “road map”. A “problem” becomes “an issue”. It has always been thus: Voltaire pointed out that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

In environmental matters words are abused as much as energy is, to hide their real meanings and persuade us that there are easy options. We have “zero carbon homes” which produce carbon, and “a low carbon building programme” which is neither low carbon, nor is it a building programme and we have carbon offsetting, which does not offset carbon, merely slings a few ounces in one side of the balance when there are pounds in the other side. Worse of all, we have the concept of “carbon neutral”.

A forum at the Burning Issue website points out that “carbon neutral” cannot apply to any carbon based fuel. It can only apply to energy sources that do not in their fuel, create carbon – such as solar, nuclear and wind energy. You can read more about this at http://burningissues.org/forum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=668 and I recommend that you do.

The burning issues website is concerned with air pollution caused by burning. My concern with this subject (and an article I wrote about this) led a UK trade association to write to me to ask me to stop criticising other renewable technologies.

I cannot do that. I cannot subscribe to the concept that all renewable technologies are equal. Some are better than others. Some are better in some locations than others. You would not put solar panels on a house that is in the middle of a shady forest and you shouldn’t put wood burning furnaces in apartment buildings in the middle of London (although the latter has happened, believe it or not!).

The good people at the Burning Issues website have calculated that to offset the carbon produced by a very small home fuelled by wood burning needs around 63 acres of land to plant trees on, cutting down two acres each year for fuel and replanting as they go. After 30 years the process restarts.

I have not tested their calculations but it is clear to me that to offset the carbon emitted by wood burning needs far more tree planting than we are doing as a planet. It may be in some communities in places where the population is small and the woodland extensive this may happen, but it does not count for much if we burn more wood than we grow each year.

Although we are not planting as many trees as we have to plant (and somehow I doubt if we ever will) out in Australia farmers are looking to store or sequestrate carbon in the soil.

Ever since Australia was colonised at the expense of its aboriginal people, the colonists have farmed sheep. They were encouraged to clear the land of trees – they would cut down a tree to make room for a sheep. Intensive grazing by sheep led to soil degradation and when the soil was degraded sufficiently the farmers move on to new land and started the process again there.

That process meant that the land was leached of its stored carbon. Currently Australian soils store little carbon but a new movement there is leading to carbon gradually being replaced in soils by farmers who farm in ways that enable the soil to hold as much carbon as possible and retain it.

In essence they want to ensure that the carbon in decomposing matter that once lived is pushed into the soil by roots of foliage and held there as humus. Depending on what you grow, the soil can either release carbon or store it and the Australian soil carbon farmers seek to retain as much carbon in the soil as possible.

Now this is real carbon sequestration; the soils of the planet already hold more carbon than the atmosphere and vegetation combined, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.

There is plenty of land to store carbon; the Australian colonial farmers were not exceptional – mostly farming has released carbon from the soil. When a forest is cleared in, say, Ecuador, for farming the clearing of the wood and its burning releases carbon and then when the soil is tilled and ploughed and worked more and more carbon is also released.

It seems fairly obvious that we should not burn wood, except perhaps waste wood from households that we cannot recycle, and that we should leave the forests undisturbed so that they can sequester carbon by allowing the vegetation to rot into peat. We should study the methods of the Australian soil carbon farmers and implement their ideas into farms everywhere.

It also seems obvious that the techniques of political or commercial persuasion by renaming things ultimately never work, because people realise eventually that the thing is still the “same old, same old” thing. They will realise it when they cough their way through wood smoke as the intensity of particulates and the measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide continues to increase and with it changing the climate, despite all the so called carbon neutrality.

Alistair Darling rather let the cat out of the bag on the Today programme on BBC’s radio 4 on Wednesday, but no-one in the media seems to have noticed that the cat has escaped.

He was being cross examined about the measures he took to correct his government’s mistake in abolishing the 10p tax rate band. He was trying to explain the mistake in terms of “sorting this problem out” as though the problem just happened by itself and was not created by Mr Darling and his leader Mr Gordon Brown.

I don’t mind that too much; I am very glad that Messrs Brown & Darling have done something to reduce the tax impact that this Government imposed just two short months ago on the poorest people in the United Kingdom.

He said he went further than people anticipated by “giving back more tax than he took away because fuel prices were rising and utility prices were rising. “A large section of the population were facing increased bills”, he said, and he wanted to help them, as other countries have helped their citizens.

That is not quite true; the whole of the population are facing increased bills. Even the lucky ones who took up the utilities’ offer to get a fixed four year energy price (like me) two years ago could not find a way to insulate themselves from petrol and transportation price increases.

Mr Darling attempted to defend the government on charges of obfuscation, delay, lack of clarity, lack of honesty, lack of trust and other venial political sins that were levied against him by the interviewer. I suppose he made a reasonable fist of it.

He said that the economy could finance the measures that he was introducing. He talked about an inflation rate of 3% and said that inflation was being pushed up primarily by oil prices and food prices. These are external factors outside his control. He was not relaxed about inflation. He then let the cat out of the bag, by saying:

“One of the big priorities has got to be for governments all over the world is to try and get oil production increased and also to tackle this problem that was pushing up food prices that was diverting corn into biofuels in a way that is not sustainable.”

Well, so much for the Climate Change legislation, the environmental agenda, the seriousness of solving climate change and the need to lead the world in climate change matters all exposed as empty rhetoric in a sentence. This Government is only concerned with climate change if the economy is strong, inflation is low and if oil prices are low. Otherwise they will persuade everyone to get more oil out of the ground to sell it to reduce the oil price.

This is very bad economics but even worse than bad economics. Such a policy, even if it were possible, would hasten climate change with all the bad effects that we fear a changed climate would bring. Mr Darling seems to have forgotten Mr Stern’s expensive advice about the economics of climate change. He has admitted that the whole climate change policy is a sham.

Mr Darling has announced a big priority in getting governments all over the world to get oil production increased. How? We cannot force countries to sel their reserves of oil at low prices. We cannot find oil where the oil companies have failed to find it. If we get even more investment in finding oil we shall only find smaller more costly oil fields to exploit, and this is what is happening anyway.

Short of nationalising the oil industry and/or invading some oil producing countries or banning the export of oil to the developing nations, I do not understand what Mr Darling means. Does he?

Particulate air pollution seems to be even worse for you than we previously thought. I have already written in these posts about the problems that biomass pollution can cause and I have also written about the link between increased carbon dioxide levels and poor health and cancers.

Now I have to add to this somewhat miserable and depressing list by warning that researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health led by Dr Andrea Baccarelli have found evidence that deep vein thrombosis is linked to air pollution – yes air pollution, not just air travel. In simple terms it seems that the pollution makes blood more “sticky” and more likely to clot, creating thromboses.

The findings include that for every 10 microgrammes per cubic metre increase in small particulates above 12 microgrammes per cubic metre of particulates in the air, the risk of developing deep vein thrombosis increases by 70%. !2 microgrammes just hapens to be the smallest amoun measured in the research. Most public health laws and policies allow 150 microgrammes.

The Harvard School of Public Health is well known for its work in the field of particulate pollution. The School has developed an ambient concentrator so that it can create precise concentrations of pollutants for inhalation and then study the effects.

Eight years ago the School studied air pollution from two older Massachusetts coal burning electricity generating plants. They estimated that these two plants created particulate emissions that could be linked to 43,000 asthma attacks, 300,000 incidents of upper respiratory symptoms and 159 premature deaths. It may sound obvious but the closer you live to the pollution, the greater the impact on your health.

The work that led to the findings about increased risks of DVT is a preliminary study based on 2000 people in Italy over a ten year period from 1995. It is not conclusive but it provides a very good indicator of the unseen risks of burning huge amounts of fossil fuel for transportation.

We have to take great care with our air quality. We are careless in burning fossil fuel. In transportation; we have known that lead in petroleum is harmful to the brains of young children but petroleum only became widely lead-free in the United Kingdom in 1990 – less than twenty years ago.

Until recently we were careless about burning tobacco in public places even though we well knew the risks of cancer associated with smoking for around fifty years. As society we were content to place those risks on non smokers and smokers alike.

We are equally careless about particulate pollution from all fuels. As far as transportation is concerned there is probably a limit to how effective filtering can be, so the solution lies in requiring cars that burn lower amounts of fuel.

We are equally careless about fossil fuel burning for power and heat generation. There are smoke washing technologies that are feasible, but very seldom are they implemented and when they are they depend on regular maintenance.

I have written about what I expect to create a problem of public health at the proposed new biomass generating plant in Port Talbot, in West Glamorgan, Wales. I am concerned that in the rush to fire a silver environmental bullet in the form of biomass, the explosion from the firearm will cause more damage than the bullet will remedy.

Maintenance is an important part of keeping down particulate pollution. You have to maintain your vehicle, and prove that it is maintained once a year, but in that year many pollutants can escape because the vehicle owner has not carried out a maintenance item either because he has been too lazy or because he could not afford to do it.

Unfortunately maintenance is often the first thing to be cut out when a family runs into financial difficulty or a business needs to perk up its profits or a nation needs to reduce its expenditure. Across the world many public transport systems, like that of London’s famous Underground, have slowly decayed from lack of maintenance.

Dr Baccarelli has provided the warning about yet another health consequence of air pollution. It took us fifty years to heed similar warnings about tobacco smoke, twenty years to heed warnings about lead in petrol; I wonder how long it will take us to heed Dr Baccareli’s warning.

Natural gas and electricity prices will get higher. British Gas increased electricity and gas bills by an average of 15% this January and is now signalling further large price increases. It claims that its profits have been hit by a 92% increase in the wholesale price of gas in the past twelve months and therefore it will need to increase its prices to ensure that it does not lose money.

All of the energy supply companies in the UK are in the same position as British Gas. Electricity and gas are still cheap for consumers in the UK. Heating oil is now around 60p a litre, which in kWh terms must be the most expensive ever.

If one of the few energy suppliers feels that it needs to increase its margins to stay in business instead of cutting them to gain a market share then it is almost certain that conditions are such that price increases will be applied by all the energy companies soon. And again.

I am not sure just how much (if anything) can be saved by switching suppliers because the timing of price increases varies as do the various tariffs available to consumers. Natural gas, uranium oil and coal are all sources of fuel which provide heat and power for homes. All of these are now being used in increasing amounts across the world with the developing nations looking set to use more and more fuel as they become wealthier.

I cannot therefore see much hope of prices stabilising. In simple terms if China’s Gross Domestic Product rises by 10% each year then its demand on fuel will rise by at least that amount for China itself. The same applies to India, Pakistan and Brazil. Together these nations have over three billions of energy hungry souls – increasingly wanting electricity to power their new appliances and heat and cooling to provide them with the same standards of comfort that energy greedy developed nations have enjoyed for decades.

Furthermore, the world’s growth in fuel demand is compound – not simple. If world fuel demand grows at 10% a year (that figure is a guess not a researched based estimate) then assuming that mining and exploration costs stay flat fuel prices will double in real terms every seven years.

But it gets much worse than that. The sources of fuel are finite. We cannot rely on gas and oil exploration companies suddenly finding huge new deposits of fuel. I have no doubt that they have already picked all the low hanging fruits in the fuel orchards. If you factor in the increasing scarcity as well as the increasing demand you might well come up with impossibly high fuel prices which in turn create impossibly hard energy prices.

The four and a half million people who live in the United Kingdom today in fuel poverty (double the figure of just three years ago) would be joined by millions more. In such a scenario they would suffer more in winter and have difficulty in maintaining standards of hygiene and comfort and worse of all winter deaths would spiral.

Particularly at risk are those who are now in their forties. They not only have to save for their pensions and their old age care but now it looks as though they will have to pay significantly more of their income, just when they cease to earn it, on their energy costs.

We have a law that requires the UK to eradicate fuel poverty amongst vulnerable households by 2010 and in all households by 2016. These laws are meaningless as fuel poverty will increase, not be eradicated, and it rather shows the foolishness of legislating by targets without understanding the real world impact on the problem that you are trying to solve.

We can adopt the optimism of Mr Micawber who said “have no doubt I shall, please Heaven, begin to be more beforehand with the world, and to live in a perfectly new manner, if -if, in short, anything turns up”.

Something may turn up. One of the frequent questions in the numerous calls for evidence and consultations and in governmental inquiries that keeps cropping up is whether there is likely to be technological advances that would make renewable energy cheaper and more viable in future? Although something may turn up human experience shows that you cannot buck the laws of physics when it comes to energy and there is not such thing as a free lunch.

We have to understand and plan for very expensive energy on the basis that nothing will turn up. If something turns up we will have lost nothing in the meantime.

The only present viable plan is to install as many renewable sources of energy as we can especially microgeneration where we will not need significant supplies of energy to provide the heat and power that we crave. My feeling is that the Government regards microgeneration as too expensive. They commit almost immeasurably small amounts of our gross national product to it. They spend more on a few MP’s pensions each year. There is no Plan A - that leaves only Plan B – Mr Micawber’s optimism.

If you think that I have over egged the pudding when it comes to predicting energy prices, look at the problem as though I have over estimated the energy prices rises by 50% or 75%. There is still a great deal of hardship that will be caused by fuel prices.

As frightening and as dangerous as fuel poverty is, what I find more frightening and more dangerous is the effect on emissions that increased fossil fuel burning will have. Of course, China, Pakistan, India and Brazil are effectively outside the Kyoto framework. Fossil fuel burning on a world wide scale increasing at 10% or more very year will create tremendous environmental problems.

The irony is that our Government seeks to control our emissions by the same mechanism that has failed so badly in the case of fuel poverty – one of statutory targets, which is a beast without teeth and without limbs.

When he introduced the Climate Change Bill Mr Gordon Brown boasted that the UK was the first country to put carbon emissions reduction targets into law. It is not surprising that other nations have not bothered to legislate in these terms.

The Climate Change Bill is very much like the fuel poverty legislation which in turn reminds me of King Canute’s courtiers. The king knew the limits of his power and when his courtiers told him he could send back the tides he made them carry him on his throne to the sea and stay while he ordered the tides to retreat. He thus demonstrated the folly of believing that because you command it, it happens.

The trouble with modeling climate change is that there are so many models. It is important, of course, to do your best to see how the climate will change but that is so hard, so complex, that different models show different results. It is hard enough to predict next week’s weather accurately so we cannot expect too much from the climate change modelers, however powerful their computing power and however agile their brains.

Kiel University now predicts that although climate change is happening and the climate is warming up the next ten years will see temperatures stay on a plateau for the next ten to twenty years and thereafter they rise. They have reached this view after studying sea ossicilations  in the North Atlantic which appear to cool temperatures on a cyclical basis, so their cooling effect will be a steadying effect on what would otherwise be rising temperatures.

Of course climate modeling is all speculation;  but it is informed, high quality speculation founded on the best scientific guesses available.

This thought might give comfort because climate change may suddenly slow down or stop altogether and temperatures may stay in their present range. If we are optimists or if we love doing things that are said to bring on climate chnage w ecan disbelieve in it; if we are pessimists who can live without doing things that bring on climate change we can believe in it.

Of course, whther the climate is changing should not be a matter of belief, but a matter of opinion. The modelers of climate change could have got it all wrong and we might well have been frightening ourselves with fairy stories. If this happens we will wonder what all the fuss was about until we run out of fossil fuel.

The other side of the coin is that the modelers of climate change could be wrong by underestimating the scope speed and violence of climate change. Modeling climate change involves as great deal more than tossing a coin. The trouble is that the science of climate change modeling is still in its infancy and even if it were mature there might be too many vested interests that stand in the way of an accurate viable climate change model being accepted.

Kiel University used bouys floating in the North Atlantic Ocean to collect data about currents that provided information about ocean oscillations which in turn was fed into their computer programmed to model climate change. The measurements indicate that we might be in for a spell where temperatures stabilise for some uears before rising again.

The present philosophy of the world is to measure things and only to rely on what measurement can show. Governments found policies on measurements and having measured things argue that the statistics show that we are happier and better off,  while we feel in our bones that we are unhappier and worse off.

This happens (and we allow it to happen) because we can measure things with our machines that we would never dream of being able to measure in the pre-computer age. We should remember that it is easy to measure quantity and impossible to measure quality. And it is virtually imposible to predict what will happen in the future until the future becoimes uncomfortably close.

On Friday morning I heard Gordon Ramsay talk on the Today Programme on BBC Radio 4 about banning out of season fruit and vegetable imports. He also suggested fining chefs who use out of season produce. Mr Ramsay, who is a highly successful chef and businessman, thinks that it is terribly important to have a new law prohibiting out of season produce – so important that he spoke with Mr Gordon Brown about it.

Mr Ramsay says there should be stringent laws passed by parliament to prevent restaurants serving out of season produce.

Mr Ramsay claims that his idea would be better for the planet than what exists now. He also claims that such legislation would be better for English cooking. I do not know enough about cooking to know whether legislation would help cooking in this country.

I do, however, know that the effect of unseasonal fruit and vegetables being carried to our shores in carbon emission terms nestles below the bottom of any list of proposed legislation to curb emissions. Any environmentalist with the ear of the Prime Minister would not waste time making such a suggestion.

Mr Ramsay fails to take into account a number of important matters; flying aircraft are probably slowing down the rate of global warming by depositing high level particulates in their vapour trails which cause global dimming and many poor indigenous farmers in the southern hemisphere can and do improve their environments and feed themselves and their families by growing food that the northern hemisphere wants when it wants it.

Mr Ramsay is unclear on several points of his suggestion; how far should food travel? Should food grown in Cornwall be used in London when it is less carbon intensive to bring it in from France? Should we give up entirely on food that we do not produce here, like bananas? Will Mr Ramsay adhere to his own suggestion by banning foreign wine from all his restaurants offering patrons only English wine? Finally, why does the BBC give airspace to this nonsense?

It seems that Mr Ramsay has a new television series to plug – let me guess, it is not on the BBC - but there is nothing like getting the media organisation that is funded by the taxpayer to help swell Mr Ramsay’s already rather full coffers by giving him valuable time to talk nonsense about a serious subject.

I could be doing Mr Ramsay an injustice. It is perfectly possible that he has suddenly seen the environmental light but this was the best idea he could come up with and that all flown in produce and wines on all the menus of all his restaurants all around the world, substituting them for locally grown items but I rather doubt it.

I seem to recall that this nouveau environmentalist (now so worried about the carbon footprint of flown-in produce) appearing on the TV show “Top Gear” a couple of years ago and saying that his cars were then a Ferrari F430 and a Range Rover Sport Supercharged. Perhaps Mr Ramsay has sold them and now uses cars with very small engines so really reducing his rather larger than normal personal environmental impact. If so, no doubt he or one of his friends will inform us by posting a response.

The real point here is not about Mr Ramsay or the BBC. The more the media gives space to nonsensical ill thought out environmental bullying the more eco weary and eco cynical we shall all become, and in the long run that will be very dangerous.

Over a hundred thousand souls have lost their lives in Burma as a result of a cyclone. Many more are likely to perish in the aftermath when diease arrives in the wake of the devastation of the infrastructure.

A tropical cyclone is an event of extreme weather. They can happen frequently but a cyclone with the devastation and force of the cyclone that struck the Irrawaddy Delta in Burma has been described by US weather experts as an event that is likely to happen once every 500 years.

In the northern hemisphere places like Burma experience cyclones usually between June and November in this way. A tropical cyclone is in essence a way in which stored solar energy is released. The sun heat up the ocean around the equator until it reaches a temperature in excess of 26.5°C. A low air pressure system then helps air convection currents pull water vapour from the ocean that forms storm clouds.

The clouds in the low pressure area start to rotate anti-clockwise. Sometimes the rotation is relatively mild but sometimes the rotation (encouraged by the rotation of the earth) becomes very violent and part of our planet experiences warmth created hurricanes, typhoons or cyclones, as Burma experienced with Cyclone Nargis and its winds of 120 miles per hour striking a very low lying area unsheltered from the winds.

Often these tropical cyclones spend themselves over less populated parts of Burma but Cyclone Nargis swept into the heavily populated low lying part of the Delta, rather in the same way that Katrina swept into New Orleans.

This part of Burma (or more properly Myanmar) is where much delta farming is carried out. Traditionally its climate is benign and relative predictable. When the huge cyclone struck it brought with it not only storms and winds but huge amounts of sea water, some of it eight metres high, which apparently struck up to 25 miles inland.

These kinds of events have struck the Burmese coast previously, but when they did their force was expended upon mangrove forests and swamps. These days most of the mangroves have been replaced by shrimp farms and rice paddies.

If you live within twenty five miles of the sea you can picture the devastation that would occur if an eight metre salt water tidal wave struck the coast near you and travelled 25 miles.

Could more have been done to warn and protect the people of Burma? I doubt it. Burma is a very poor country with difficult communications. In Bangladesh a similar sized cyclone caused relatively moderate loss of life – around 3,000 people, recently. People in Burma may not have listened to cyclone warnings even if there was a sophisticated cyclone warning system and cyclone exit routes such as exists in Bangladesh, because the Burmese may have preferred to risk their lives in order to protect their meagre possessions.

Did climate change and in particular global warming create the conditions that made Cyclone Nargis happen? Meteorologists are unsure because there is not enough meteorological data available about the Indian Ocean. Traditionally climate scientists hold that global warming will inevitable cause more storms and more violent storms, although there is simply not enough evidence to lay the blame for Cyclone Nargis at our fossil fuel combustion’s door.

If Cyclone Nargis was caused by changes in the climate caused by our emissions it illustrates very well what really happens. We burn the fossil fuel in the developed world and the low parts of the undeveloped world suffer first. Make no mistake there is real suffering in Burma’s delta region caused by this devastating cyclone.

However much aid the developed world gives we cannot make it right, we cannot bring back life. It may not be as simple as the more oil gas and coal we burn for our luxuries and the more tropical mangrove forests we cut down for our cheap shrimp cocktails the more dead and disease and starvation will be experienced in places like Burma. But then again, it may be just as simple as that.

If you want to donate to help the Burmese people have a look at http://www.dec.org.uk/

One of the arguments that people deploy against solar system is the cost. Because they claim “you don’t need a solar system” the cost of a solar system should be treated as the cost as an additional appliance, a bit like the Energy Savings’ Trust curious concept that solar systems are lifestyle choices.

Some people think that you might need a roof, a boiler and electricity and central heating but you don’t need a solar system. Therefore, the argument goes, because you don’t need a solar system you judge it in a different way, financially, from things that you need to have.

Of course if you do not need a solar system and you treat it as any luxury item the financial consequences are irrelevant. However, there are various ways in which you can define need.

• You may need a car but you don’t need a Rolls Royce.
• You may need a home but you don’t need a palace.
• You may need a bowl of rice or a loaf of bread but you don’t need a feast.
• You may need a water heating system but you don’t need a carbon dioxide emission device that pollutes particulates into the atmosphere as it burns fuel that will soon run out.

Apart from the 90,000 or so families who have thermal solar heating systems (almost all are water heating systems but  some are space and pool heating systems) in this country, everyone else creates huge amounts of carbon dioxide when they heat water. This may range from 2 tonnes of emissions a year if they use heating oil as their source of fuel, to around two thirds of a tonne a year if they use the most efficient state of the art super condensing gas boiler.

We don’t need all these millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, carbon monoxide emissions, sulphur and other particulates, nor do we need the nitrous oxide emissions and acid rain that fossil fuel burning creates. We certainly don’t need the waste radioactive material from nuclear power plants.

In other words around 22 million homes are using a malignant, unsustainable means of heating water when there is a choice of using a virtually carbon free benign means of water heating.

At the moment strange at it may seem to a casual observer the ability to emit copious unnecessary and harmful quantities of carbon dioxide and pollutants is still considered to be a matter of choice. It was, however, also considered a matter of choice several hundred years ago that people could profit from the misery of others.

Slavers could choose to enslave people for profit and slave owners to use them for profit. Employers could choose to employ children for long hours in dangerous occupations instead of society paying for their education. Employers could choose to create dangerous employment conditions for their staff with no prospect of compensation of the staff suffered injury as a result.

At one time surgeons operated on people without washing their hands and without cleaning their instruments and without taking precautions and as a result half the patients died of sepsis. Joseph Lister, a Scottish surgeon in the face of much opposition in London, showed that by using carbolic acid to clean the rate of deaths from sepsis fell tremendously; his work was “proved” by the Germans in the Franco-Prussian war and eventually adopted by the London medical profession.

So, you don’t need a solar system any more than

• You don’t need to make slavery illegal
• You don’t need to educate children
• You don’t need to create safe working conditions.
• You don’t need clean hands and instruments to carry out operations.

For most people the most important thing is their family. People work hard, long hours in order to provide a better life for their families. Mostly each successive generation has managed to provide a better life for their children, sometimes only marginally so, sometimes tremendously so, but the motivation to improve the life of your descendants seems to be written into our genetic codes.

Most people have sacrificed their own quality of life – the Energy Savings’ Trust “lifestyle choice” and often their own health and their lives - for their children. Every soldier who has fought for his country knows this; the country for whom the soldier has fought knows this.

The future generations now face a real life threatening danger. Virtually everyone agrees on this. I do not want to overstate the danger – we can simply use the words of our political leaders, religious leaders, learned scientists and most of whom agree that climate change is the greatest long term threat that humanity faces.

Solar systems will not by themselves save future generations from the threat of climate change, nor will they by themselves prevent global warming. However, they are a critical tool which as part of an overall deployment of critical tools will make the world in future a better place for the generations to come and not a worse place for them.

So we do need to have solar systems and as many of them as possible.

In all the uncertainties about climate change one thing is very clear. In the United Kingdom we are experiencing more extreme weather and we are feeling the effects of extreme weather more extremely than ever. I think that what is happening is that climate change is having an effect on our environment in ways that we have not planned for.
A great deal of brain power goes into planning the infrastructure of a developed nation. There are transport systems to build and maintain, communication links, homes to build and shops schools and offices to serve the homes. In addition we have to provide work for the population and while all this is going on plan for the increase in population and make educated guesses at how the economy will work, how much we will grow by and what will be our food requirements.
We also have to decide whether we are likely to have any enemies and then what share of our wealth we need to invest in protecting ourselves as a nation and our citizens from criminals. It is a complicated scenario.

But woven into this garment is a thread that joins all these complications in one enabling whole; if we pull the thread away the whole falls apart and becomes no more than rags. That thread is energy. The matter is made more complicated by the centralisation of our gas and electricity supplies. There are few energy supply companies and fewer gas and electricity generating companies. The supplies of gas and electricity depend on relatively few suppliers and by 2020 over 75% of the fuel that we need will come from abroad.

A key part of the energy problem (and there is an energy problem) lies in the centralisation of energy. It seems that parts of the United Kingdom are becoming prone to increased flooding as a result of climate change or cyclical weather variations. As a result we have now discovered that many power plants and water treatment plants can be so badly damaged by future flooding that they will have to shut down if floods on the scale of those that happened a year ago were to re-occur.

You may remember that floods last year cane within a foot of causing the close down of Walham electricity switching station which supplies power to over half a million buildings in Gloucestershire and acts as a relay switch for South Wales. In Mythe flood damage to the water treatment plant cut of water supplies to over a third of a million Gloucestershire homes.

As a nation our flood warning systems are almost non existent, responsibility for surface water run off is unclear, no one knows who should be cleaning out drains and the £800 million budgeted for flood defences seems significantly less than we need to spend to save life and propertyBut flooding, probably one of the several effects of climate change, like climate change itself needs many solutions, not just a single solution.

One important way to alleviate the effects of flooding would be to decentralise energy and localise it as much as possible. It is not enough to set up local power and heat generating stations, although these are very valuable, because they all depend upon some form of fossil fuel supply, usually gas, and are therefore vulnerable to flood disruption.

We have to go smaller scale than that and relive the central energy of as much of the burden as possible by using homes and businesses and mini centres of energy generation. That means solar panels, PV panels and where appropriate wind turbines to generate heat and power. The more microgeneration devices that we have the more energy self sufficient we are and the less our nation shall experience the worse effects of energy disruption by such events as flooding, war, economic changes and strife.

There will be a price to pay because the capital cost of microgeneration is (when balanced on the present uneven playing field dominated by the fossil and uranium fuel providers) is relatively expensive but in uncertain times it could prove a very shrewd investment indeed.

Mr Gordon Brown’s recent speech was about climate change and as you would expect he tried to put a very positive emphasis on the government’s climate change policy. It is worth looking at the speech in detail so that we can fully measure the government’s climate change policy against a proper yardstick. I shall give you my views of yardsticks later in this post, but first let us look at the policy initiatives which Mr Brown claims are the right initiatives to solve climate change:-.

The Green Hotline

Mr Brown announced a Green Hotline to advise people about carbon savings and efficiency. This was first reported to my knowledge (it may have been reported earlier) on 18^th November 2007. I wrote about it in posts of 19^th November 2007, 20^th November 2007 and 21^st February 2008. I am not impressed with the concept of a “Green Hotline”. It will waste money better spent on measures.

Plastic Bags

Mr Brown “seeks” to end the use of plastic bags in supermarkets and shops. This is quite an old chestnut. I wrote about this on 14^th and 19^th November 2007, 1^st, 13^th and 24^th March 2008 3rs April 2008 and 5^th May 2008. This is not a policy but simply a talking point and I shall not be surprised if we are still talking about it in a year from now. Mr Brown will convene a forum of supermarkets to discuss plastic bags. Now we know who runs our country’s plastic bag policy.

Targets

Mr Brown said the UK’s emission target of a 60% cut by 2050 could be increased to 80%. I have written many posts about targets; if you want to read them all just put “targets” in the search engine on the post. You can have all the targets that you want – they are easy to devise and hard to fulfil. Measures, not targets, will make a difference to climate change.

We have had a statutory “fuel poverty” target for many years, and we have failed to achieve the target. What remedy is available for the fuel poor? A judicial review! Probably embarrassing for the government but hardly something that a fuel poor person can use to fight off the cold.

Energy Efficiency

There will be more help – but it has already been announced. Energy efficiency is virtually the government’s sole carbon reduction policy for homes which account for around a quarter of the UK’s emissions. In this context the policy means loft and cavity wall insulation which saves energy and are important but should not be the sole tool of a home energy policy.

The UK a World Leader in building a low carbon economy

This was probably the best joke in the whole speech. Genersys has businesses in many countries and I have knowledge of the policies affecting our product – solar thermal technology around the world. In my view the UK government has the least support, the least confidence and the greatest hostility to using free benign light to provide heat. At the moment we do lead the world in one thing connected with climate change – consultations.

Tough decisions

Once again the Government talked about making tough decisions; these are the tough decisions that they have made – a Green Hotline, perhaps no more plastic bags if the supermarkets agree, targets which are unenforceable and home insulation. My posts of 19^th November, 27^th December and 9^th January 2008 all suggest that Mr Brown is not making the hard, tough decisions.

The Yardstick

I am not a religious person but I was once told by one when we were discussing morality that there is no universal yardstick. Every person is measured by his own personal yardstick. It gave me pause. I had to agree. An intelligent person of principles is judged by his own qualities, not those of an unprincipled idiot. There is no measure against which we can judge Mr Brown but his own.

I do have the sense that Mr Brown is in politics because he cares and because he desires to right what he perceives to be injustice and wrongs. I think that most politicians are in politics for the same reason.

Mr Brown recognises that the Western world have created the problem of climate change by its greedy and uncontrolled consumption of fossil fuel. In fact the United Kingdom has been responsible for more emissions over the past 250 years than any other nation, due to its early and intensive industrial revolution. Mr Brown will not make the hard decisions about climate change becasue put simply these involve sacrifice now for future benefit.

And therefore when you put him up against his own personal yardstick, he fails to measure up.