I’ve rarely ever agreed with Ed Miliband. In contrast I usually agree with, Sammy Wilson, the Democratic Unionist MP for East Antrim. Strangely, I found the position completely reversed on Tuesday at Energy and Climate Change questions in the Commons.
Sammy questioned Ed regarding an issue on which I’d had a score of emails from constituents. I don’t know where they got the story from but I’ve been confidently replying that it is utter nonsense. Here is Tuesday’s exchange between Sammy & Ed:
Sammy Wilson
In the 1970s, global warmists wanted to put black dust on the Arctic to block the sun. Now the Minister wants to put black dust on clouds to block the sun again. Is his plan not bonkers? £50 million of taxpayer’s money has been spent, which will only put up energy prices even further.
Ed Milliband
Secretary of State, Energy & Climate Change
This is like conspiracy theories gone mad. I feel like we have entered a whacky world. Let us keep our eyes on the prize. As a country, we are vulnerable because of our exposure to fossil fuels. This Government has one mission alone: to get clean, home-grown power, so that we take back control.
I share Tony Blair’s doubts about the Government’s timetable for achieving net zero carbon emissions. We are in danger of crippling industry with uncompetitive energy costs in an expensive race to net zero.
That said, I do support the objective, if not the timetable. Achieving the objective will, in the long run, reduce our energy costs and rescue our planet.
The important thing about net zero however, is understanding the meaning and importance of ‘net’.
No matter how hard we try, and how difficult we make life for ourselves in the medium term, we are still going to be reliant on hydrocarbons to generate power in a substantial number of processes and applications for many years yet. This will continue to generate carbon dioxide emissions that warm the climate. The requirement is to remove sufficient carbon from the atmosphere so that what we take out, balances what we continue to generate.
Carbon capture and storage can be achieved by enlightened agricultural policy but, in my estimate, technology will prove much more important.
The capability to sequester carbon dioxide from the air is a technology developed over a century ago. It does not involve diming the sun, or any other such nonsense. It is however, an energy hungry process which we need to improve before implementing on an industrial scale.
Technology ‘to the rescue’ will be politically much more tolerable than persuading people to give up meat, dairy products, private transport , and overseas holidays, or -for the conspiracy theorists- forgoing sunshine.