“Get fracking and put green issues on hold.”Just what we need. More short-termism. It’s served the country, the world and the environment admirably thus far.
It's a bit unfair to take that part of my comment in isolation, I actually said: "Get fracking all the gas we can, get out all the gas under the North sea that we can - open coal mines too.
Put green issues on hold until the whole world accepts it needs to act together."
On Newsnight, a few weeks back, they were covering energy prices. At one point they showed numerous power stations (coal/gas/oil) being demolished in the UK in the nineties and noughties as part of the green agenda. But then they went on to explain that this winter we will import much of our electricity from Belgium/France/Norway...
at a much higher cost of course and the French and Belgians and Norwegians are still polluting the planet to make this power, so although we might think we 'look good' because we are edging towards net zero, in effect we have just out-sourced the problem to our near neighbours!
Exactly the same has happened with manufacturing by-the-way. People say we are doing well on carbon emissions compared with say India or China, but the fact is for the last 40-50 years we have moved to a service based economy whilst contracting out the production of things to other countries. It is fake progress because these other countries are still polluting the planet to make the gadgets and gizmos we buy, with the money made here in banking/insurance, shops and hotels!
When I was a kid in the 1970s we had one landline, one colour TV a couple of radios and some gadgets in the kitchen - when I look around my flat now and see multiple devices either plugged in on standby or charging up (laptop/phone) its crazy and that is replicated across the whole country and the population is 20 million bigger too!
I read a book recently: 'Hothouse Earth' by Bill Maguire that makes a convincing argument that we have already gone past the point of no return and there is nothing that we can do about the damage humans have done to the planet, since the industrial revolution.
There might be a slim possibility of reversing it if all but the most essential air travel ended tomorrow, almost all cars were banned, eating meat was illegal and countries went to aggressive 1 child per family rules to reduce the global population, that sort of thing.... but what are the chances of that?
