Extracts from NATTA's journal
Renew, issue 150 July-Aug 2004

9. Lords on Climate Change

It’s interesting that many of the most important debates on energy issues these days seem to be in the House of Lords- as several earlier items in this news illustrate. Back in Feb., the House of Lords also debated Climate Change.  While there was widespread concern about the impacts of climate change  and general support for Kyoto and the governments approach, there were those who were not happy with some aspects. Lord Tanlaw commented ‘Kyoto will do little at this stage to reduce global carbon emissions. What it may succeed in doing is to create out of every extra tonne of carbon generated into the atmosphere just one more tax collector, businessman or lawyer to make capital out of it at ground level.’ 

More positively several speakers welcomed the practical grass roots approach to sustainable energy being developed by Woking Borough Council (see Groups). Moving up scale, and following up the earlier debate on Tidal power (see Renew 149), Lord Lord Dixon-Smith also asked whether the economics of the Severn Barrage might be seen as more reasonable if the government used lower rates of return- for example 6%.  The same of course might be true for the economics of nuclear power, and there was certainly a lot of concern expressed about the governments lack of support for nuclear power.

 Responding to this Lord Whitty commented ‘at  present, nuclear power is neither a sustainable technology- it is a low-carbon technology- because we have not yet worked out how to deal with waste, nor is it a particularly cheap way of saving carbon. As regards tonnes of carbon saved per buck, nuclear energy remains an extremely expensive short- and long-term way of saving carbon.’   He also had some interesting things to say about hydrogen and aviation (see  the Technology section of Renew 150).