Most discussion of energy now seems to focus on the wrong theme, worries about global warming due to emissions of greenhouse gases. Any warming of the earth from man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases will probably be modest, most likely rising by 2 to 2.5°C over the 21st century (according to the UN Climate Panel).
The Climate Panel says that it will not reduce food production or increase the number or intensity of hurricanes. This is hardly the most important problem for any of the world's nations. Nature and humanity will easily adjust to it.
There is only one valid measure of the overall state of the environment: average life expectancy. By this standard, the environment has been improving for a century. More humans are healthier than they have ever been. The biggest improvement in life expectancy of the last 50 years was achieved by revolutionary China, as average life span rose from 30 to 70 years for 1.2 billion people. The second biggest improvement was by independent India, freed at last from the massive famines characteristic of the centuries of British rule. The most significant manmade worsening of life expectancy, five fewer years on average, happened in post-counter-revolutionary Russia. In Britain our life expectancies continue to rise.
However, the world's nations face huge problems: every year, 10 million children under the age of five die of preventable diseases. 1.1 billion people still have no clean drinking water, and 2.5 billion have no access to sanitation, causing 2 million deaths a year and 500 million severe illnesses. The more spent on measures against global warming, the less is spent on more immediately vital matters, such as access to clean drinking water.
Plan
Britain, like every other nation, needs an integrated plan, using renewables, coal, nuclear power, oil and gas. We cannot leave development to the anarchy of capitalism, where power companies indulge in an EU-driven feeding frenzy of competition, acquisition, merger and destruction. Foreign ownership of Britain's utilities means minimum investment, maximum export of profits. The essential work of refurbishing the national grid will cost an estimated 10 billion where's the investment going to come from? Foreign utility companies?
So cutting carbon emissions is not the best way to achieve progress. It would be costly, yet ineffective. For example, it is estimated that implementing the Kyoto agreement would cost $1 trillion, and it would only cut a tiny slice off the temperature rise.
Britain is not about to run out of hydrocarbons. Clean coal technology, in which Britain was a world leader, was abandoned at privatisation, when the capitalist class closed down so many of our pits. So last year, we produced 28 million tons of coal, but imported 32 million tons. We need to reopen viable mines. We need to reassess the reserves of oil and gas in the North Sea and off the West coast of Scotland.
We were self-sufficient in energy until just recently. One projection is that by 2020 we will be relying on imported gas for 80% of our energy needs. We can be self-sufficient again, and we need to be, if we are to be an independent sovereign country. Otherwise we would be subject at any time to pressure or blackmail. Supplies could be switched off at any time should the producer country change its priorities.
Amicus and the NUM recently warned that a growing crisis in our electricity industry will lead to blackouts and further electricity price rises. They warned against relying on oil and gas from unstable regions like southern Russia, the Middle East and North and West Africa.
Powergen confirmed how right the unions are when it recently told us in a leaflet distributed to its customers, "From 29 November 2004 your electricity prices will rise by around 44p a week. Why the price increase? There are many reasons, for example: producing energy is now more expensive, so the wholesale price of energy has risen for all suppliers. The UK's gas supply is also declining so we must now spend more importing gas from around the world."
The unions warned that EU directives would add to our energy problems, particularly the carbon emissions trading directive which would curtail the lifetime of existing power stations. The unions believe it is vital that the nation invests in clean coal fired power stations and in power engineering and manufacturing industries to develop expertise in designing and building new power stations.
In 2003 nuclear power stations provided 23% of Britain's electricity. By 2010, a third of these will have reached the end of their operating lives and will be closed, and nuclear power will account for just 16% of our electricity supply. Only two new stations are under construction. The closures will reduce Britain's ability to generate our own dependable energy supply. We need to plan and build more new nuclear power stations. France's nuclear plants produce three quarters of the country's power, one of the cheapest energy supplies in Europe.
We need to reduce energy waste, estimated to cost 5 billion a year, and rationally use our resources. We need to develop new technologies to economise on energy use. The government has failed to invest in Combined Heat and Power. We need more R&D into carbon free and carbon sequestration technologies. Biomass crops could be grown especially for use as environmentally friendly fuel. This would boost farm diversity and create rural jobs. It could be competitive against conventional hydrocarbon-based energy generation, and could meet 10% of our energy needs.
Friends of the Earth say renewable energy has the potential to provide all our needs. Not so for the foreseeable future —hydroelectricity, wind and tidal sources provide just 3% of our present energy, and wind and solar energy are intermittent: their annual power output is only 25% of the potential output if operating always at full power; by contrast, nuclear power's output is 90%. Blackouts three quarters of the time, anyone?
Scares
The issue of global warming is scare- mongering, a red herring to make workers take their eyes off the tasks facing us, such as planning our energy production and stopping deindustrialisation, unemployment, the destruction of our services, and the European Union's assault on Britain.
| The EU's energy squeeze on Britain |
| The proposed European Constitution would, for the first time, put energy policy under the control of the European Commission (see other Feature article). Already, before the constitution has been ratified, the European Union is building up its own strategic reserve of oil and gas, grabbed from member states on the pretext of "security" and "high prices". As the proposed European constitution makes clear, this is about control of reserves, not husbandry.
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| At the same time, privatisation of electricity, driven by the European Union, together with an unscientific fear of nuclear power, have derailed Britain's nuclear strategy. The absurd consequence is that we are now reliant on imported French electricity (via cable under the Channel) of which 80% is produced from nuclear stations. Meanwhile, the enlargement countries are also being forced at their own expense to close their nuclear power stations and become dependent on Western supplies. In the words of the European Commission, this is "to make a re-launch of nuclear power in Europe possible"!
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The facts are that continental Antarctica has been cooling and its glaciers thickening for the past 30 years. Global fertility rates are falling dramatically, and with advanced technology, farmers are producing more food using fewer resources than ever before. Environmental pollution accounts for at most 2% of all cancer cases versus 30% caused by tobacco use. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, the world's forests covered 40.24 million square kilometres in 1950, and 43.04 million in 1994. 80% of the world's original rain forest is still intact. Sea levels in the region of the Pacific around the island nation of Tuvalu have been falling.
Some see all problems as supranational, requiring supranational solutions, world-wide action through intrusive international agreements like Kyoto, with cartoon cries to save the world through pre-emptive actions. They revive the anarchist slogan — No states, no borders — mirroring the capitalist agenda of globalisation.
Human innovation is the ultimate resource. Workers are wonderfully creative. The Greens, with their contempt for productive forces, line up with the anti-industry parson Malthus against the pro-industry Marx. The working class cannot conduct its present policy on the basis of scares about a possible future ice age in 50,000 years.
