Two articles in today’s Telegraph demonstrate the ludicrous situation our politicians have gotten us in to on renewable energy. The first, gives an insight in to the damage the Chinese are doing to the north of their country, in pursuit of the coal to needed to power their ever increasing chain of coal fired power stations. However, it’s not the fact that the Chinese are causing areas of their landscape to cave in to vast underground mines that caught my attention, but the scale of their appetite for coal, compared to the rest of the world. Quoting from the article by Malcolm Moore:

‘To keep its glittering skylines alight, China now uses more coal than the United States, Europe and Japan combined. But voracious mining has hollowed out vast tracts of the north of the country, leaving three million people living on ground that could collapse at any moment.’

The second article is entitled, Wind turbines ‘will treble under Coalition planning reforms’, by Louise Gray and contains the statement that demonstrates perfectly how the government is getting things so wrong. ‘A separate analysis by the Department of Energy and Climate Change says the reforms are essential to “deliver the infrastructure we need to reduce our carbon emissions”.

It’s that last statement that demonstrates to me, that it is the liberal fanatics who are in the driving seat when it comes to renewable energy in this country, not the pragmatists who understand how pointless the pursuit of carbon reduction is, when the Chinese so obviously don’t give a damn about their massive and ever increasing contribution to this global problem.

For me, a third article, written by Geoffrey Lean, actually strikes the right note and is much more likely to gain wider public support than continuing to bang on about reducing the UK’s measly 2% contribution to the global carbon emissions figure. This country is currently pursuing the ambitious goal of a low carbon economy, something we need to do reduce our continued reliance on fossil fuels.

I don’t agree with the emphasis we are currently seeing government place on the construction and installation of wind turbines. It would be far more beneficial to this country, if we could encourage as many residential and commercial properties as possible to install some form of renewable energy generation. Installing solar panels, air and ground source heat pumps, or maybe even anaerobic digesters, is far more likely to be both possible and productive than a wind turbine is every likely to be.

The sooner we stop the obsession with wind turbines and start using some of the ridiculous amounts of money given in subsidy to the operators across a wider audience, the sooner more of us will be making our own contribution to reducing our reliance on fossil fuels and yes, our carbon emissions (a bit!).