While everybody’s busy discussing ethics in the media, today’s been a great day to bury bad news – the shelving of the Energy Bill – and with it the Green Deal, the only hope Britain had left of economic recovery in the short-term.

And what of the Electricity Market Reform white paper and the National Policy Statements on energy ? Into the round wastepaper-bin-shaped recycling receptacle, possibly.

What next ? The revocation of the Climate Change Act and the dissolution of the Committee on Climate Change ?

I don’t know whether I should make overt political statements, but I think this news sugar ices the brioche, so I will : David Cameron’s “greenest government ever” has failed.

We need Van Jones, right here, right now.

It is a newer, clearer tone that George Monbiot uses in his piece “The nuclear industry stinks. But that is not a reason to ditch nuclear power“. He seems to have lost his dirty annoyance with filthy anti-nuclear activists and moved onto a higher plane of moral certitude, where the air is cleaner and more refined.

He is pro-technology, but anti-industry. For him, the privately owned enterprises of atomic energy are the central problem that has led to accidents both of a radioactive and an accountancy nature. “Corporate power ?”, he asks, “No thanks.” The trouble is, you can’t really separate the failings of nuclear power from the failings of human power. It’s such a large, complex and dangerous enterprise that inevitably, human power systems compromise the use of the technology, regardless of whether they are publicly or privately owned. For a small amount of evidence, just look at the history of publicly-managed nuclear power in the United Kingdom. Not exactly peachy. And as for those who claimed that a “free” market approach to managing nuclear power would improve matters – how wrong they were. In my view, on the basis of the evidence so far, nobody can claim that nuclear power can be run as an efficient, safe, profit-making venture.

Added to that, even with moves towards privatisation and market liberalisation, though it’s assets were transfered to private ownership, and it’s liabilities left with the citizens, privately-owned nuclear power could never shake off the responsibilities it owed to the state, and it never will. As George says, it’s “far too close to government”. There is an automatic accountability built in to running such an invasive and risky electricity generation system. The UK Government recognises it can never fully devolve responsibility for nuclear power to private operators – it is preparing to take nuclear power companies into state administration if they fail financially – as part of the new Energy Bill and Electricity Market Reform policies.

So that means, that in addition to a raft of stealth and open taxpayer support for new nuclear power, there is, embedded and hinted at in these new regulations, the assurance that if the nuclear power industry continues to fail, it will be re-nationalised, and the private operators will not have to bear the financial losses. Nuclear power investment is being set up to become financially secure, even if it continues to be physically insecure. This deal will be worse than the generous arrangements made under the privatised construction industry – which built piles of energy-poor shoddy public buildings at ongoing extortionate cost.

The lack of transparency about this new nuclear deal, and the inevitable wrangling, is bound to lead to poor outcomes. As George says, “It is through such collusion that accidents happen.” So it’s rather strange that he calls for the guardrail that “new generation of nuclear power stations should be built only with unprecedented scrutiny and transparency”, when all the evidence points to the conclusion that it can never be done. You cannot have nuclear power without the spin, it seems, so George will not win change by “favouring the machines and opposing the machinations”.

We do have to work on the basis of evidence in technology. When I say “technology”, I don’t mean the science – they are entirely different things. Yes, nuclear power designs can be verified by the science of theoretical physics and improved by engineering expertise, but the factual evidence from over 50 years of nuclear power technology is that the industry, as George Monbiot puts it, “a bunch of arm-twisting, corner-cutting scumbags”, invariably misses the safety, productivity and engineering standards that one would hope would be expected from it based on scientific recommendations. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s privately or publicly managed. This suggests it’s not corporate mismanagement that’s always at fault, but rather the human management of the nuclear power technology itself. What we are trying to achieve with nuclear power may be too complex to be stable with humans in charge.

The learning process in nuclear technology has produced some gains, and George Monbiot is confident that, “Today’s technologies are safer still”. The central problem with this hopeful, optimistic, technodream argument is that it will still be Homer Simpson managing the day-to-day operations at nuclear power plants. The other central problem (since it’s a multi-piered core) is that the unexpected keeps happening in nuclear power. But so does the expected. Tritium gas build-up in pressurised water reactors was a known, calculated problem, but how is it that leaks are still occurring ? Have we not mastered this ? Will we ever be able to ?

I do not think we can ever be absolutely sure of nuclear power, regardless of developments. What the people in the management of the industry have said has not been backed up by facts on the ground, nor by the confidential whistleblowing reports of the engineers.

A large nuclear accident would be a catastrophe, but the chances of it occurring are slim, although Fukushima Daiichi proved they’re fatter than we were led to trust. However, the two most certain risks posed by nuclear power are its unreliability and its cost, neither of which have been improved after over half a century of development.

Nuclear has not provided, and Germany has decided it cannot provide. George Monbiot repeats the erroneous logic that because Germany has cancelled its nuclear programme, and is building more fossil fuel plants, that their carbon emissions will rise, “Angela Merkel announced a possible doubling of the capacity of the coal and gas plants Germany will build in the next 10 years”. What he neglects to factor in is that with the rapid rise of renewable energy in Germany, the new coal and gas plants will only be needed for the equivalent of a few weeks each year to back up wind and solar power in inclement weather conditions. He says “The renewable technologies which should have replaced fossil fuels will instead replace nuclear power.” In fact, what will happen is that Germany’s well-funded renewable energy technology deployment programme will replace both – when load balancing is improved and backup for renewable power becomes obselete.

George Monbiot makes a poor argument about energy demand reduction. “But even with a massive cut in overall demand, getting the carbon out of transport and heating means increasing electricity supply.” Getting the carbon out of transport requires either (a) massive production of biofuels or (b) rapid conversion of the entire vehicle fleet to electrical power, at massive cost to the public, coupled with a massive rapid increase in low carbon power generation. Can nuclear power provide ?

Personally, I don’t see low carbon biofuel production growing very much. And as for speed in growing renewable power supply, well, that’s pretty much scuppered by low ambition currently, and anti-wind farm sentiment. Nuclear power can never be built at speed, so it rules itself out of the strategy. No, getting carbon out of transport requires rationalisation of transportation – so more re-localisation of food production and service provision. And it also requires the refitting of vehicles currently in use to run on compressed biogas.

And as for George Monbiot’s argument that nuclear power is required to provide heating services, well, the “Centre for Alternative Technology’s radical and optimistic plan” that he cites doesn’t assume nuclear power for that task. The rule is “insulation, insulation, insulation”, and you won’t find nuclear power making up much more than a tiny slice of the CAT’s Zero Carbon Britain projection.

As for George recommending “fourth generation technologies” in nuclear power, I’d like him to point us to a single instance where these technologies have been tried, succeeded and are likely to be rolled out further. Generation Three technologies are not magnificent perfomers, so can we expect better of Generation Four ? Only the nuclear industry public relations firms are sure on that one.

And finally, George Monbiot gives the impression that besides Fukushima Daiichi, all the rest of the Japanese nuclear power plants are safe, tidy and wonderful when he writes, “The best evidence for the safety and resilience of nuclear power plants can be found at Fukushima. Not at Fukushima Dai-ichi, the power station where the meltdowns and explosions took place, but at Fukushima Dai-ni, the plant next door. You’ve never heard of it? There’s a good reason for that. It was run by the same slovenly company. It was hit by the same earthquake and the same tsunami. But it survived. Like every other nuclear plant struck by the wave, it went into automatic cold shutdown.” Massive earthquakes and tsunamis are rare, but ordinary everyday failings are sadly, rather common. In addition, two thirds of those reactors that failed on 11th March 2011, are still not operational again. The closer George Monbiot looks at the nuclear power industry, the more faults he will see.

http://www.monbiot.com/2011/07/01/nuclear-power-the-big-debate/
“Nuclear Power – The Big Debate : George Monbiot : On Thursday 7th July, I’ll be thrashing out the issues with Greenpeace and others. Come along if you can…”

Image Credit : Mark Holderness

Mark Lynas betrayed more of his intellectual influences this week, when he tweeted as @mark_lynas “Colony collapse disorder – honeybees – not quite the environmental story it seemed:
http://breakthroughjournal.org/content/authors/hannah-nordhaus/an-environmental-journalists-l.shtml”

Hmmm. That’s a piece from a new generation of Nordhaus-es, Hannah, writing for the Breakthrough Institute, founded by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, authors of “The Death of Environmentalism“, a document I truly regret wasting the paper to print. As I read it, I started scratching hot red comments in the margins, so many, that in the end the pages were more red than black-and-white.

Hannah’s piece, like her book, “The Beekeeper’s Lament“, is more delicate and considered, I think, but still shreds decades of environmental thought and much science, without any justification in my view.

She writes, “…very quickly, many journalists settled on neonicotinoids — pesticides that are applied to more than 140 different crops — as the likely culprit. It seemed a familiar story of human greed and
shortsightedness. With their callous disregard for nature, big chemical companies and big agriculture were killing the bees — and threatening our own survival. The honey bee’s recent problems have occasioned a similar rush to judgment. Before any studies had been conducted on the causes of CCD, three books and countless articles came out touting pesticides as the malady’s cause. Had I been able to turn a book around quickly, I might have leapt to the same conclusions. But I was late to the party, and as more studies came out and I came to better understand the science, I became less and less convinced that pesticides provided a convincing explanation for beekeepers’ losses…”

Her argument appears to be that pesticides are bad for other pollinators, not bees; but that this makes life harder for the bees, who then have to do all that pollination instead :-

http://naturebeebookclub.wordpress.com/2011/05/02/the-beekeepers-lament-nordhaus-hannah/

“In steps John Miller, a boundingly energetic and charismatic beekeeper, who tasks himself with the care and the sustainable keeping of honeybees. He is descended from America’s first migratory beekeeper, N.E. Miller, who, at the beginning of the 20th century, transported thousands of hives from one crop to another, working the Idahoan clover in summer and the Californian almonds in winter. Back then beekeepers used to pay farmers to keep a few dozen hives on their land. But now farmers pay beekeepers millions of dollars to have their crops pollinated by upwards of ten thousand hives. With the rise of the monocrop and increasingly efficient pesticides, there are simply not enough natural pollinators to complete the massive task of sexing-up millions of acres of almond groves.”

This kind of writing seems to me like a lot of anti-green writing, where a straw man is set up, only to bow down and worship it. The central framework of fallacy appears to be :-

a. Environmentalists are zealous, and therefore crazy.
b. They believe pesticides are dangerous to bees.
c. They must be wrong, and pesticides can’t be all that bad for bees.

Let’s just read a little around that idea, shall we ? Let’s start with Wikipedia, just to make it easy :-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pesticide_toxicity_to_bees

“For the majority of pesticides that are registered in the United States, EPA only requires a short-term contact toxicity test on adult honeybees. In some cases, the agency also receives short-term oral toxicity tests, which are required in Europe. EPA’s testing requirements do not account for sub-lethal effects to bees or effects on brood or larvae. Their testing requirements are also not designed to determine effects in bees from exposure to systemic pesticides. With Colony Collapse Disorder, whole hive tests in the field are needed in order to determine the effects of a pesticide on bee colonies. To date, there are very few scientifically valid whole hive studies that can be used to determine the effects of pesticides on bee colonies.”

Actually, it’s not just “mad environmentalists” who are concerned about the effect of pesticides on honeybees. Here’s just one scholarly paper :-

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0009754
“High Levels of Miticides and Agrochemicals in North American Apiaries: Implications for Honey Bee Health”, Mullin et el., 2010.

What has this got to do with Climate Change. I can hear you asking ?

Well, it’s like this – in order to do intensive farming, agricultural chemicals are used on crops. Specialised herbicides, pesticides and fungicides are used on genetically modified crops, along with chemical fertilisers.

In order to convince people to accept Genetically Modified food, they’ve got to be encouraged to believe that pesticides, herbicides and fungicides are really alright.

Hence, pesticides cannot be fingered as a problem for bees, otherwise people might not accept GM crops…

Yes, it’s coming back round to tampering with our food genes. And it’s being sold to us as a cure for Climate Change.

At the bottom of this page there’s a transcript of a snippet from a television programme I was unlucky and incensed enough to have viewed yesterday. Called “The Wonder of Weeds”, it took us through the basic logic of modern-day plant breeding, including the role for genetic modification of plants – without once mentioning the words “life sciences”, “bioengineering”, “biotechnology” or even “genetic modification”.

The GM crops are presented as being the saviour of humanity, without once mentioning why conditions in the world may be damaging crops in new ways in the future, a lot of which will be due to climate change.

There was the usual category error – of confusing science with technology. Let’s repeat that one again. Technology is when you play with the genes of a crucial staple crop like wheat. Science is when you discover, maybe 25 years later, that it has had knock-on effects in the food chain. Oh dear. Too late for remorse – the genetically modified genome is now globally distributed.

The presenter of the programme, Chris Collins, didn’t even spot the cognitive dissonance of his own script. In the first part of the programme he talks about common weeds that are foreign invaders in the UK and cause untold trouble. In the second part of the programme he doesn’t even blink when he talks about modifying crops at the genetic level – not questioning that introducing foreign genes into vital crops might have detrimental, unforeseen impacts – rather like a microscopic version of the imported “plant pariahs”, Buddleia davidii, Rhododendron ponticum and Japanese knotweed. Oh yes, Oxford Ragwort, another introduction to the UK, is not such a hazard, but you can’t guarantee what happens when you get plant invaders.

I find it astonishing that such obvious propaganda on behalf of corporate plans to modify crops for their own private market profit is allowed into BBC television programming.

Climate Change is being used as the Trojan Horse rationale in which to bring GM crops to the UK, and elsewhere, as part of international agricultural development programmes. This is the ideological equivalent of a rogue gene inserted into the DNA of science. I find this an outrage.

I recommend you check the work of GM Freeze to counter this braintwisting manipulation.

And if you want a little bit more of an insider on what Dr Alison Smith, featured in the BBC show, is actually doing with her amazing knowledge of plants – it seems her work encompasses improving the production of alcoholic beverages, not feeding the world. I kid you not :-

http://www.foodsecurity.ac.uk/news-events/news/2011/110615-pr-improved-crops-food-security.html
“Glucosidase inhibitors: new approaches to malting efficiency : Alison Smith, John Innes Centre : Improving the efficiency with which barley grain is converted into beer and whisky would reduce waste and energy consumption in the brewing industry, as well as ensuring profitability. This project aims to improve the efficiency of malting, the first stage in beer and whisky production, by building on new discoveries about how barley grains convert starch to sugars when they germinate.”

What is the BBSRC ? This is a research programme that’s “infested” with corporate people – whose agenda is money-making, not philanthropy.

And what’s genetic modification of crops got to do with Mark Lynas ? Well, just read his new book, “The God Species“, and you’ll find out.

The plain fact in my view is that we do not need genetically modified crops in Europe. In Africa, they’re too poor to afford the chemicals to use with the GM seeds. And in the not-too-distant future, the price of the chemicals will shoot up because of Peak Oil and Peak Natural Gas, making GM crops inaccessible to those North Americans who currently use it. So this particular technology takes us nowhere forward at all. We need to manage water and the root causes of poverty rather than tamper with genes.

BBC 4 TV
Saturday 25 June 2011

“The Wonder of Weeds”

“Travelling around the UK and meeting experts in botanical history, genetics, pharmaceuticals and wild food, Chris Collins tells the story behind the plants most people call weeds.”

45 minutes 20 seconds

…And the massive irony of all this is that the very crop that has become a monoculture at the expense of weeds, wheat, was once a weed itself…

Plant scientist Professor Nick Harberd of Oxford University has researched the moment a weed became wheat.

Nick : “About half a million years ago, there was spontaneously, in the wild, nothing to do with human beings, a cross-hybridisation, a cross-pollination if you like, between two wild grass species…”

“…So one can imagine that humans were cultivating this wheat [10,000 to 12,000 years ago] in a field and then by chance a weed was growing within that field. And there was again a spontaneous hydridisation event beteen the cultivated wheat and this wild grass that was growing in that imaginary field.”

“The whole process made a plant that was bigger and more vigorous. And as a result of this we ended up with the wheat crop we all grow and feed off today.”

Nick can exactly recreate exactly how wheat and weeds crossbred in a lab today…

47 minutes 40 seconds

Weeds helped us out millenia ago and now scientists in the 21st Century have turned to weeds once again for one of the most important discoveries in plant biology ever.

It could save lives by creating a super wheat.

It all took place here, at the John Innes Institute in Norwich.

Alison : “So come on in Chris. You need to sterilise your feet here…”

Chris : “So this means we’re not bringing in anything nasty from outside…”

Alison : “That’s right. No thrips or viruses or anything else that might come in.”

Dr Alison Smith is head of Metabolic Biology here.

Chris : “This is the first time I’ve ever dressed up to go and see a weed.”

Alison : “We look after our weeds very carefully here.”

Alison’s team have been studying a small common weed called Arabidopsis [thaliana] or Thale Cress, which is now used as the model to map the DNA of all plants on the planet.

Alison : “Well this weed is incredibly easy for us to work on. And all plant scientists almost in the world take information from this weed. And many plant scientists only work on this little weed.”

“The reason why it’s really useful is that like a lot of weeds it goes from seed to seed really quickly, so we can get through lots and lots of generations, and that makes it easy for us to do genetic studies to understand how the weed behaves and what all of its genes are doing.”

“But also, about 20 years ago, plant scientists got together. And at that time they were working on lots and lots of different plants. And they decided, let’s work on one plant together that can become the model from which we can develop our understanding of plants.”

“So about the same time as we were sequencing the human genome, we started to sequence the genome of this little weed. So in 2000 we got the entire gene sequence of this weed, all of the genes are known, the same time as we understood the human genome.”

Chris : “So really then, this small weed is a blueprint for all plants ?”

Alison : “This is the model for all plant life, that’s right.”

But the sequencing of the Arabidopsis genome is not just for the sake of it. Alison and her 600 colleagues are unlocking the secrets of the plant’s success, like its speedy growth rate and its hardiness, and are transfering those abilities to the crops that matter to us, like wheat.

This is one of the most important discoveries in plant biology ever, where one of the humblest weeds could save millions of lives around the world.

Chris : “Now we’ve seen our magic weed and you’ve got this genetic blueprint. How do you take that blueprint and apply it to arable crops like this wheat ?”

Alison : “Well we can start to tackle, using this blueprint, some of the real problems that we have with our crops like disease, for example. Our crops are quite susceptible to some diseases. We’ve been able to breed for that, but we haven’t known what genes we’re breeding for.”

“In Arabidopsis, Arabidopsis gets diseases as well, we can understand exactly how it’s resistant to those diseases. We know what genes it needs. And we can say right, where are those genes in wheat ? Can we make sure that our new wheats have the genes that make them resistant to disease ?”

“Another example would be how the wheat exactly makes its seeds. Obviously, this is the really important bit of wheat. This is what we eat. This is human food. We understand a bit about the process of about how these little seeds are formed, but in Arabidopsis we understand in absolute molecular detail how those seeds are made, and that helps us to understand how we make to make better seeds, bigger seeds, more nutritious seeds in wheat. We can apply that knowlege in wheat.”

Well, I know scientists don’t like to be too dramatic, but I’m going to be, because of simply what I’ve found out. Weeds can play a big role in arable crops like wheat, or even maybe the future of humanity.

Alison : “I think it was the starting point for what has to be a revolution in our crops, a revolution in understanding how they work and making them work better and doing that fast.”

“It’s taken our ancestors, you know, millenia, to get to this point. We can’t afford to take the next step in millenia. We have to take it in tens of years or less. And in order to do that, you’re absolutely right, the information from Arabidopsis has been the key to pushing us forward.”

It’s the resilience of weeds and the insights they give us into helping crops survive that makes them amongst the most useful plants on the planet…

Kirk Sorensen, formerly of Teledyne Brown Engineering, now of Flibe Energy

To: Claverton Energy Research Group
From: Jo Abbess
Date: 24 June 2011
Subject: “Don’t believe the spin on thorium being a ‘greener’ nuclear option”‏

Hi Clavertonians,

As you are, I’m sure, aware, context is everything.

I was so sure we’d escaped the clutches of the “Thorium Activist Trolls” a few years ago, but no, here they are in resurgence again, and this time they’ve sucked in George Monbiot, Mark Lynas and Stephen Tinsdale, all apparently gullible enough to believe the newly resurrected Generation IV hype campaign.

They should have first done their research on the old Gen IV hype campaign that withered alongside the “Hemp will Save the World, No Really” campaign and the “Biodiesel will Save the World, AND You Can Make it at Home” brigade. Oh, and the Zero Point Energy people.

I was, I admit, quite encouraged by both the Hemp and Biodiesel drives, until I realised they were a deliberate distraction from the Big Picture – how to cope with the necessity of creating an integrated system of truly sustainable energy for the future.

Hemp and Biodiesel became Internet virally transmitted memes around the same time as the Thorium concept, but where did they come from ?

Where does the Thorium meme originate from this time round ? I found some people took to it at The Register, where they spin against Climate Change science a lot – watch the clipped video :-

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/01/china_thorium_bet/

I would suggest that there are connections between the Thorium campaign and the anti-Climate Change science campaign, and I have some evidence, but I’m too busy to research more in-depth just now, so I’m not going to write it all up yet.

The key issues with all energy options is TIME TO DELIVERY and SCALEABILITY, and I think the option presented by the Thorium fuel cycle fails on both counts.

Yeah, sure, some rich people can devote their life savings to it, and some Departments of Defense (yes, Americans) and their corporate hangers-on can try selling ANOTHER dud technology to China (which is the basis of some Internet energy memes in my view).

Remember Carbon Capture and Storage ? The British Government were very keen on making a Big Thing about CCS – in order to sell it to the miscreant Chinese because (WARNING : CHINA MYTH) China builds 2 !! coal-fired !! power stations a week/day/month !!

THORIUM – A Brief Analysis
TIME TO DELIVERY – 20 to 50 years
SCALEABILITY – unknown
USEFULNESS ASSESSMENT – virtually zero, although it could keep some people on the gravy train, and suck in some Chinese dough

The Tyndall Centre say that global emissions of greenhouse gases have to peak AT THE LATEST by 2020. We should be thinking about rolling out the technology WE ALREADY HAVE to meet that end.

Don’t believe the hype,

jo.

PS What other evidence do we have that the Thorium meme is most likely just a propaganda campaign ? Nick Griffin of the British National Party backs it, and the BNP are widely alleged to promote divisiveness…

The final part (I really hope it is the final part) of Adam Curtis’ trilogy on “Evil” Computers and “Devillish” Enviromentalists – “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace” – a title drawn from a poem written by what would appear to be a madman – has now been uploaded to YouTube, allowing me to view it without taking part in the memory-eating public monitoring disappointment that is BBC iPlayer :-

Adam Curtis certainly reveals himself as a little monkeyish in this episode, throwing overarm and underhand javelins at “liberals” of all hues and cries, particularly environmental ones; and throwing in liberal references to primates wherever he can, seemingly to suggest that mankind has un- or de-evolved by adopting computing tools and studying the natural world.

I can’t say for certain whether he is recommending the opposite of liberalism, freedom and liberty, which would of course be totalitarianism. But he seems to be implying that liberal society and open source networking bring humanity to dictatorial, warped, centrally-managed control, which would in fact be a good definition of totalitarianism. I can’t fathom the alternative he might be driving at. Apart from his assertion that there is no hope for the future.

He shows a fascination with intelligent people bleeding to death, probably as a reference to society and intellectualism losing too much “blood” sanity to survive. [JOKE ALERT] On the other hand it might be a coded message to Richard Dawkins, who he probably doesn’t like very much. [JOKE OVER]

Curtis reveals himself as not being very cognisant with information technology, nor the liberating powers it offers to mankind. He also doesn’t seem to understand that his accusations of liberal interference in resource-rich Africa by Europeans (and Americans) could equally well be described as residual paternalistic colonialism.

He seems to revel in opening up some ridiculous theories proposed by neo-eugenicists, self-referential genetic mathematicians, that came along with some psychologically wounded fundamentalism, both religious and conspiracy theory crankdom.

Adam Curtis’ film didn’t unteach me anything about systems and computer programming, which is still all good, and gets us to the Moon and geostationary orbit and stuff, and handles logistics for just-in-time delivery of aspirin and nail scissors. In fact, without systems and programming, Curtis wouldn’t have been able to research and make this film, so I don’t see what he can possibly complain about. The whole series is like an ill-fitting suit slung on some out-of-date thinking, if visually and aurally stimulating.

I felt it was a punch too low to have a go at David Attenborough in the middle of all this by association – he’s a national hero and I won’t have a nod nodded against him. Of course, for Curtis, since Attenborough’s a man of the environment, and has filmed in Africa with gorillas, he must be a choice target, typifying all that Curtis appears to believe is worst.

I don’t think I really learned anything from this final episode in particular, apart from being informed that the early Internet meme that suggested that medical science induced the emergence of HIV has finally taken a silver bullet and a stake through the heart, and the fact that some people are very, very strange, even when they have high IQs.

Not worth the BBC licence fee, in my humble opinion.

I receive another letter from Iain Duncan Smith MP on vellum yellow with sickly pale green type. “Dear Mrs [sic] Abbess”, the letter reads, “Further to our previous correspondence regarding Stop Climate Chaos Big [sic] campaign, please find enclosed a reply from Chris Huhne, the Energy Secretary.” I asked Iain Duncan Smith in person for his own and personal support for a strong Energy Bill. What did he do ? Pass my letter on to the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). I would have prefered a personal commitment to the issue, but, sadly, it was not to be.

The Rt Hon continued, “I hope you find his letter reassuring…” Reassuring ? What ? Am I some kind of emotionally incontinent complainant ? “…and helpful. However, please don’t hesitate to contact me again if I can be of further assistance.”

No, I didn’t find the letter from Chris Huhne helpful. I found it nauseatingly stuffed full of compromise. It explained to me that the ECO (Energy Company Obligation) would be replacing both the CERT (Carbon Emissions Reduction Target) and the CESP (Community Energy Saving Programme). In a section headed with “Warm Homes Amendment”, the letter explained the Green Deal would be “underpinned” by the ECO. “The Government’s ambition on reducing emissions” boomed the missive from DECC, “is clearly set out in the legally binding Climate Change Act and the projected contribution of the Green Deal towards this is analysed in the Energy Bill impact assessment…We want the Green Deal to achieve the largest market possible, but it would not be appropriate to set specific targets for this scheme.”

I beg your pardon ? First the letter emphasises the legally binding Climate Change Act, which has legally binding carbon emissions reductions, and then the letter says that one of the key policy vehicles to deliver the Carbon Budget under the Climate Change Act should not have any measurable goals. So, tell me, why are we doing this Green Deal, again ? If we can’t measure out and plan its impacts, how do we know if it’s going to reach the right level of achievement ? Since this is one of the main proposals in the Energy Bill, it seems daft, if not a downright compromise, not to lay out expectations in numbers and percentages.

I wonder what on Earth could have brought this remarkably low ambition about. The next sentences inform me. “Our view is that businesses do not need Government targets, they need the opportunity to make reliable profits. The Green Deal mechanisms make business sense – as a commercial opportunity as well as a money saver.” So there it is, in black and white – the Green Deal is not about achieving carbon dioxide emissions reduction goals – it’s all about privatised energy companies turning a profit, and a reliable one at that. So presumably, if the energy companies don’t think Green Deal opportunities are going to make them money, they will whinge and moan and wheedle about how they can’t take part, and they won’t take part, and ambition and achievements will be as low as the CERT and CESP.

As if to anticipate my hollow laughter, the letter continues, “However, the Green Deal is not the sole mechanism for achieving our carbon budget and fuel poverty targets – it will be integrated with a wider set of policies, not least the future ECO. We are working to ensure that the policy landscape as an integrated whole is fit to deliver our ambitions for the household sector to 2022.”

This is truly a cheapskate policy. The Green Deal is supposed to be cost-free : homeowners and landlords apply for loans from energy companies, to fit insulation and renewable energy to their properties, and the loans are repaid from the energy savings – meaning the property owners pay nothing extra overall, and the energy companies continue to make the same level of profit. If it does work in the manner intended, the Government will not have to spend any public money on subsidies to raise levels of home insulation, solar power, wood burners, double glazing and the like. It is utterly ridiculous not to set any ambition for real emissions reductions through the Green Deal if it’s going to cost nobody a penny more than they spend today.

The Energy Company Obligation is supposed to offer ways for energy companies to keep returning a healthy dividend to their shareholders, even while they sell less high carbon energy overall. The other option would be to increase the amount of low carbon energy they supply – but it’s expensive to invest in new forms of low carbon energy, and it would dent energy company shareholder earnings, or raise consumer energy prices. So, obviously, energy companies are going to be reluctant to spend on new low carbon energy resources. And so, barring more state control over energy, it would seem to make most sense to push schemes like the Green Deal, selling less energy but more energy services.

Without ambition, the people are disappointed. Without a strong Green Deal, the people will be left paying big energy bills, and kept dependent on energy companies for home comfort. Chris Huhne, what a waste of a great policy idea !