The Big Freeze

As I was scraping the inch-thick ice off my car windscreen this morning, dodging all the dead birds falling out of the sky, I was at the same time decrying the lack of joined-up thinking in our government's policies on energy consumption.

I sometimes think this blog is in danger of turning into some kind of survivalist manifesto. When I fantasise about winning the lottery, for example, I quickly move on from thoughts of new cars and holiday homes on the Vendée coast to fortified buildings, security systems, big piles of wood and canned goods, and armaments.

But if you despair about the state of the world, it's only because you know that it needn't come to that. In the 70s, during the big energy crisis caused by oil embargoes and miners' strikes, the government ran a successful energy saving campaign: SAVE IT! Everybody was made aware of pointless waste, things like putting too much water in the kettle, having a bath instead of a shower, having the central heating on too high.

I was heavily influenced by that campaign and I'm always mindful of the way I use energy at home. On the other hand, we had a government in the 1980s that was determined to accelerate the growth of the economy in any way possible - and that included the privatisation and fragmentation of our energy suppliers, all of whom now have a vested interest (on their shareholders' behalf) in making sure we use as much energy as possible.

As for this government, it's when you hear successive news stories on successive days, as one department or another issues a report or White Paper, that you realise that - not only are they not talking to each other - but that the correspondents who parrot their press releases aren't talking to each other, either.

As the BBC story referred to above notes, none of the current concerns should come as a surprise to anyone.

Five years ago the Royal Commission on Environment Pollution (RCEP) said that rising energy demands, together with a policy of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, posed "...a radical challenge for the UK; a challenge that cannot be met successfully unless the government's energy policies and its environmental policies are coherent."

Reducing energy use should be a priority, it said, but the government needed "...to give much higher priority to energy efficiency, a change in public attitudes, with people linking their own day-to-day use of energy with fossil fuel consumption and the threat of climate change."