I blame Russia. Poland has joined the ranks of European states planning to expand nuclear power (Bulgaria is planning to reopen closed stations, Sweden has just reversed a ban on nuclear, and Britain is committing to new stations in England). This is crazy for reasons that all environmentalists will know. They can’t be brought online in time to solve the energy gap from declining fossil fuels; they create insanely hazardous and difficult to store waste; Uranium is a finite resource; and they are far from being carbon neutral (how are they built, how is fuel transported to them &c.). The problem is, they’re a pre-existing technology, that is seen as “tried and tested”. Why’d anyone want to develop the mix of renewables and energy efficiency when you can just build nuclear?
The problem just now, and the reason I blamed Russia at the start of this post, is that at least two of the recent re-commitments to nuclear aren’t motivated by environmental concern, rather they are motivated by a well founded fear of energy security. In the UK, we might feel as if we’re suffering if energy bills go up as a result of instability in supplies. Try Bulgaria, where gas was cut, in midwinter, by the Russia-Ukraine dispute. Thousands of people simply didn’t have heating.
The temptation to run back to the gleaming nuclear future is just too easy to give into. And I’d venture a guess that more states will envisage that future, so long as Europe is reliant on gas, and thus Russia. In the long term, Azerbaijan can’t meet Europe’s gas demand, so while the Nabucco pipeline will diversify supply, we’re still getting our bulk of gas from Russia. The Nord Stream and South Stream pipelines still leave us beholden to Russia, not to mention the potential for widespread environmental damage from these projects, Nord Stream in particular.
In grasping at nuclear, Bulgaria and Poland have almost got the right answer to energy security, but they miss out environmental concerns completely. Yes, we need to have a more diverse energy supply to avoid reliance on one potentially hostile state, but the only solution which can be sustained in the long term is a renewables mix and reducing our demand.
It has to be welcome — to some limited degree at least — that the PM has taken some of the principles of the Green New Deal into his plans for spending his way out of recession, but I think he’s compromised too much.
The ‘Green’ Green New Deal as proposed by the New Economic Foundation calls for a “carbon-army” of people employed to construct the new infrastructure that is needed to convert from fossil-fuel based power generation to renewables. Brown’s new deal is too broad. It only tags investment in measures against climate change on as a part of an overall wider plan. Even within this limited part of the proposal, it doesn’t exactly look to do very much. Investment in environmental technologies includes investment in nuclear power, which I’m guessing will gobble up a fair chunk of the funding. A proper green new deal would give Britain the infrastructure needed to ditch fossil fuels, put the country in a better state to weather the rest of the century, and create far more than just 100,000 jobs. I look forward to hearing more details of this policy, to see if there is actually any hope for it to achieve its ambitions. Somehow I doubt it though.
I heard on Radio 4 that the Tories are criticising Mandelson’s appointment to the cabinet on the grounds that he isn’t an MP. Somehow, they suggest, his position in the Lords will make him and his department less accountable. Obviously, there are issues with an un-elected chamber, but he’ll still be accountable to Conservative peers. Their timing shows that their target is Mandelson, not the concept of peers in cabinet, which has been going on for a long time.
UK politics is doing the cannibalism thing today. David Cairn’s departure from office, and the rumours of Caroline Flint’s soon to be announced plans to devote more of her time to her hobbies seem to be suggesting that the Labour boat is being rocked quite well. The next few days will be interesting.
