The 4 fuel economy

Polly Toynbee in the Guardian today writes about the potential costs of alternative energy:

ID cards may cost £19bn, as the LSE suggests, or a mere £7bn, as the Home Office claims. But even £7bn is such a monumentally enormous sum you have to pinch yourself to believe it. Would people rather have the plastic card or Britain on the road to partial energy self-sufficiency and a real drop in emissions?

I tend to agree. Against ID cards anyway, not just because I already hate having to have a passport, but because of the monumental waste of money this big-government-computer-project-that-won't-work will be.

If we're going to have a money pit, then let it be the pit of solar panels on every rooftop, and wind turbines wherever there is wind. Let's all live in windmills and drive skycycles!

As for climate change, I'm more ambivalent. It's easy to believe that we're in a period of adjusted climate. Extreme weather seems more common. Or is it that reports of extreme weather are more common, as 24-hour news outlets struggle to fill their schedules? Accept it that they don't require actual news, maybe there is something to climate change.

I've been saying for years that warm wet summers and warm wet winters seem to be the UK norm now. But the rain we get seems to come in the form of deluge rather than in a series of more manageable showers. Hence the twin tropes of UK weather: floods and hosepipe bans, both of which point to inadequate investment in sewerage and water management, which, apparently, is what the British people wanted when they voted for Mrs Thatch.

Well done.

The people of the future, chewing beeswax to make their candles, will surely look back in wonder at a nation that pissed away oil and gas wealth on inefficient transport systems and excessive packaging and closed coal mines that still had coal in them.

If carbon emissions are causing global warming and global warming is related to climate change, and if that climate change is real, what - realistically - is the time frame for turning that oil tanker around? 10 years, 20? 50 or 100? I suspect that 50-100 years is more like it - and few people are capable of planning that far ahead. And what if we run out of oil/gas/coal long before then? Won't reduced carbon emissions happen as a natural consequence, with nobody having to do anything?

Do we need ID cards? No. Why are we having wars/terrorism? Because of the imminent shortage of oil. Do we need alternative forms of energy? Yes. Is it because we can do something about climate change? No. It's because we have an imminent shortage of oil. Ergo, a solar panel on every roof will solve the global terror problem.