Monbiot first came to my attention when I was about 22, searching through the non-fiction section of my local Oxfam bookshop for something interesting to read. I found his book, "No Man's Land", and was soon educated about the struggle of nomadic Tanzanian and Kenyan herdsmen against safari parks, game reserves and Canadian cereal companies to keep the lands they had been grazing for hundreds of years. If I'm being completely honest, I wasn't hooked immediately. I think I was intimidated by his passion for his subject. Something I was yet to experience.
He has, however, become omnipresent in the environmental and political activist arena and as his CV shows, he clearly deserves it. More about George Monbiot here.
Anyway, as the title suggests, this post isn't all about the man himself. It's about a cracking article he wrote for the UK-based Guardian newspaper on the 20th of May, 2010, titled, "Out of Sight, Out of Trouble."
In this mind-blowing piece he outlines how the UK could not only end it's dependency on non-renewable energy sources by the year 2050, but also become a mass net energy exporter. And how exactly are we to accomplish that? No doubt through the building of expansive onshore wind farms and environmentally damaging tidal barrages, eh? No. Exactly the opposite in fact. The report which Monbiot draws his information from (the Offshore Valuation report, published by the Public Interest Research Centre) suggests that all of this energy can be produced by offshore wind farms and tidal energy systems.
The cost of construction, implementation, and training would of course be huge, but, according to Monbiot, not that much greater than the building of the North Sea oil and gas infrastructure and even if we were only to capture 29% of the potential, we could produce the energy equivalent of 1 billion barrels of oil per year. This is on par with the average amount we've been getting from North Sea oil and gas over the last 40 years. Also, it would create jobs for over 140,000 people and generate an annual revenue of approximately 62 billion pounds. As an added environmental bonus, it has been shown that the building of such offshore windfarms can increase the abundance of fish and crabs (link).
So what do we need to get started on this awesome project? Strong governmental backing, investment, and a change in the general mindset towards clean energy initiatives. In a perverse way, the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico may be the catalyst we need to make these things happen. Fingers crossed that some good comes of it.
Well said old chap.
ReplyDeleteLet's hope the powers that be and the general populous pull their heads out of whatever orifice it's been stuck in and realize, "Hey, we can still get sickeningly rich off of Green power!"
Spread some sense and maybe (BIG maybe) they will.
Eco doesn't necessarily equal Commie after all. However I do wonder what Kim Jong-il's take on all this is...
Have you read about South Korea's tidal power research and trial runs? pretty interesting stuff. Seems the government here is backing fairly strongly with no major oil lobby in the country.
ReplyDeleteYou know who I think will eventually own a lot of the green energy initiatives? Oil companies. They didn't get rich by being completely stupid. They can see the writing on the wall as far as oil prices. At some point the prices will go so high that it will become cheaper to use alternate fuel sources. Oil will start to see diminishing returns on spending more money to reach the tougher to get oil and trying to offset the cost of collecting it to the customers. I can't imagine that these companies are simply burying their heads in the sand and ignoring this. I bet they've got things moving along already to make the switch at some point.