When 'Green' isn't 'Green'

Yesterday Josephus wrote quite a piece on the mirage of "free" energy and the pitfalls of covering the landscape with the noisy eyesores of wind 'turbines.' All of this is being pushed forward by WWF, Greenpeace, other "Green" NGOs and all the rest of the "Climate Change/Global Doom Warming organisations. As he mentioned, the proponents determinedly ignore all evidence of environmental damage being done in this pointless pursuit of this golden dream of a "fossil fuel free future."

The vision set out in the report Josephus cited is a grand one, but takes no account at all of the environmental, economic, political and resources impact of attempting to generate electricity in desert areas and then distribute it to countries not just thousands of miles away, but on different continents and even on different sides of an ocean ... Nor does it attempt to address the thorny question of how it will all be paid for or who will pay for it. Josephus raised a second thorny issue. The report proposes placing all these wonderful generating systems in some of the least stable, politically, areas of the world, under the control of governments who have something of a track record of behaving in a somewhat petulant manner in international relations. One can easily imagine a scenario where someone in one of these countries, no doubt "provoked" by some supposed "slight" to his faith, country or culture, could pull the plug on Europe.

Today a report published in the geologists journal, suggests that geological evidence suggests that the 2*C warming the AGW/IPCC pundits want to prevent is not preventable. Indeed, they go further, they say it is inevitable and that sea levels could rise by well over 20 metres as a result. But that, as they are quick to point out (but which will no doubt be omitted from any popular press reports of this) will require the melting of all the West Antarctic ice shelf, all the Greenland ice and most of the sea ice shelf in East Antarctica - which would take thousands of years.

I can see many reasons for finding cleaner energy supplies, but the most important, in my opinion, is to break away from our dependence on oil supplied by countries whose regimes are unstable, untrustworthy and interested only in destroying Western culture and economies. We cannot do entirely without oil, but we can use it more efficiently, we can ensure there is less wastage and we can certainly make better use of our own resources such as coal. But none of these is likely to even be looked at until we can break away from this fetish for "free energy," which, as Josephus has pointed out, is neither "free" nor clean and green.