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		Time to get serious about energy August 21 2004 Floods in Cornwall. Landslides in Scotland. Oil at $50 a barrel. Petrol soon to be £4 a gallon. We seem to have a problem. Many commentators blame extreme weather or global warming. Indeed the British media have uncritically swallowed the global warming story, and ridicule anyone who questions it. Yet I can remember the Lynmouth flood disaster in 1952. My family had just returned from holiday nearby and missed it by days. It was practically identical to the recent disaster in Boscastle, and no one blamed global warming. In fact many scientists around the world, including our own David Bellamy, have serious reservations about global warming. The fact is that the world's climate has changed many times even in the recent geological past. Twenty thousand years ago Chicago was under hundreds of feet of ice. So much water was bound up in ice sheets that the sea level was lower, and you could have walked from Dover to Calais on dry land. These changes are caused by a complicated interplay of factors that include minor fluctuations in the Earth's orbit, and changes in the energy output of the sun. There is good evidence that the sun has got brighter over the last thousand years. Back in the seventies they were already publishing "climate-disaster" books - but then the worry was global cooling. We had titles like "The Coming Ice Age". Climate scares are a bit like food scares and diet advice - more to do with fashion than science. Nevertheless, enough scientists are concerned about climate change and greenhouse gasses that we should do well to take precautionary measures. Our two key objectives should be to reduce emissions, and to reduce UK dependence on imported oil and gas. But tragically, we seem to be doing the opposite. According to estimates from the Institute of Civil Engineers, we currently get 35% of our energy from coal, and 22% from nuclear. They estimate that in six short years, those figures will be down to 17% and 16%. That leaves a shortfall of 24% to be made up elsewhere. Renewables will help, but will probably not make up even a quarter of the shortfall. The rest will have to come from even more imported oil and gas, at ever higher prices. Even massive investment in wind energy will only make a marginal contribution, and there is considerable and justified resistance to the proliferation of wind farms. One area where we can and should do more is in bio-fuels, and here the blame lies with Gordon Brown. If he would make the necessary tax adjustments, 5% of all the diesel we use could be from bio-fuels. A key problem we face is that current nuclear power stations are long in the tooth, and will have to be phased out over the next ten years. We need new nuclear plants merely to maintain current capacity. We should be building more on top, since nuclear is the only major source of CO2-free generation. As a nation, we really have to get over our irrational fear of nuclear energy. Apart from the entirely predictable and preventable disaster at Chernobyl, nuclear generation has a better record both in terms of safety and of environmental impact than either coal or oil. The choices are: more nuclear, or more greenhouse gases, or waiting until the lights go out. It is true that nuclear is expensive, but if we consider the environmental costs of CO2 from oil, coal and gas, and if we factor-in the cost of dependence on imported oil from unstable countries, nuclear starts to look like good value. Given that we increase nuclear capacity to reduce CO2 emissions, we could then make better use of coal. Coal will never be perfectly clean, but modern coal plants are much cleaner than they were. But here we run up against one of the scandals of the EU's Single Market. Britain is built on coal. The primary reason why our coal industry is defunct is that Germany has used a loophole in EU State Aid rules to provide massive subsidies to coal fields on the Rhur, while we in Britain are unable to retaliate or defend our domestic coal industry. Solve this problem, build more coal-fired power-stations, and we could provide a third of our electricity for decades from our own coal, massively reducing our dependence on imports. The twin problems of emissions and import dependency can be addressed with a combination of coal and nuclear. There are signs that this Labour government is finally getting its head round the problem. It's time to marshal public opinion in support of practical solutions.