Reading the article, earlier, just made me think, of how incompetent some politicians are, if not the whole bunch of self serving, selfish cretinous morons. The statement in this piece is self explanatory I reckon. But also, why are we, the taxpayer, supposed to foot the bill for new technology, when the power companies will be the ones to benfit in the end.....??? If windmills are so great in renewable energy, why have they to be subsidized by us...??? Prince Phil the Greek, was right in slamming the darn things a few days ago, he may be 90+ years of age, but he's all there.... Tossers............
The answer, my friend, is... But I have to agree in general about the standard of our political representatives - of all parties. I'm from an age when politicians had some respect, when you knew that even the members of your opponents' party had principles (even though you could never agree with them). How many politicians would you class as principled nowadays? The only name I can come up with is Dennis Skinner
Dom this is a very complex area to consider. The simple reality is that the oil won't last forever, it just won't, but everyone seems to think this is no great problem, they apparently don't realize that huge parts of our chemical industries rely on oil as a feedstock, it is much more useful in this form than it is when we burn it. We get oil essentially for free, in technology terms it's cheap, it comes out the ground, we really don't have to work too hard to get it even in today's terms, but it is finite. People think that energy supply is a small question that things will just keep on the way they have into the future one way or another, sorry guys it WON'T. Things are going to get very very bad in a few years as the Nuclear stations have to be retired and as local gas supplies dwindle. Nuclear supplies in the region of 20% or more of our energy when these stations close the lights are going off for many many hours a day, how long till that starts happening? About four years, that soon! There is a hidden subsidy in oil and coal, that subsidy is the millions of years of photosynthesis that created the plants that decayed into the oil and coal that we burn today, we are basically spending our inheritance like it will never end. Note I have not even mentioned global warming, I don't have to, it basically does not matter because we can't keep up our current way of life if we continue to rely on fossil fuels, we are already probably past peak oil production so how can growth continue if the the global energy supply is going to diminish? You cannot make something from nothing (unless you are god ) making anything requires energy, if you don't have energy your factories shut down, you stop making stuff. Personally I like technology, I want to live in a world with cellular phones and affordable air travel, I want to be able to turn my heating on in the winter (not done that this year yet living under a quilt) I want my internet and all the other stuff that the modern world has given us. So yeah absolutely we need any and every alternative technology and if that requires an artificial government subsidy well fine, personally I would rather they invested in Thorium nuclear technology or even existing nuclear technologies, the people that fear nuclear are seriously misinformed, but sadly our government will pander to the anti nuclear brigade and are pretty much guaranteed to screw up so badly that it's pretty much a safe bet that the lights are going off pretty soon. I could keep this rant up for a very long time, I might continue tomorrow
