Calls to “get drilling” may sound like common sense amid the crisis in the Middle East – but they won’t bring down bills. The real solution lies in green energy.
The economics here are solid, drilling more won't cut bills when oil is priced globally and the North Sea is running dry. No argument there. The donor links are worth highlighting too.
But this piece does something the parties do: it picks a side in a binary that doesn't need to exist. "Drill more" is the right's answer. "Go green" is the left's. Both are incomplete, and the reason neither side will say so is that energy policy in this country is shaped by donors and tribal loyalty, not by engineering reality.
The missing word in this article is nuclear. Britain pioneered civil nuclear power. The data shows it's one of the safest energy sources ever developed. It provides the baseload that renewables can't. And it was abandoned under political pressure not because the evidence changed, but because the party system couldn't defend an unpopular truth.
Here's the irony: if we had stayed the course with nuclear, we'd actually have the clean energy binary this article wants. Nuclear for baseload, wind and solar for the rest. No gas dependency. No exposure to Middle Eastern price shocks. No desperate calls to drill a basin that's running dry. The debate today would be about how to balance two clean sources, not about whether to keep burning fossil fuels at all.
The party system didn't just fail to plan for the future. It actively destroyed a future that was already being built. And the system that killed Britain's nuclear programme is the same one being asked to deliver a thirty-year energy strategy now. A five-year election cycle will never deliver one.
Obviously increasing wind and solar (and fusion, if it ever happens) is a no-brainer, but the majority of vehicles and domestic central heating systems in Britain are powered by fossil fuels. The cost - and fossil fuels needed to create the products to achieve it - would be immense, and if done en masse would presumably consume considerable oil/gas and contribute to global warming. That's not to say the end-goal isn't worthy, but I don't think Britain will see a significant switch to electrification for transport and heating before they run out of accessibile fossil fuels.
The economics here are solid, drilling more won't cut bills when oil is priced globally and the North Sea is running dry. No argument there. The donor links are worth highlighting too.
But this piece does something the parties do: it picks a side in a binary that doesn't need to exist. "Drill more" is the right's answer. "Go green" is the left's. Both are incomplete, and the reason neither side will say so is that energy policy in this country is shaped by donors and tribal loyalty, not by engineering reality.
The missing word in this article is nuclear. Britain pioneered civil nuclear power. The data shows it's one of the safest energy sources ever developed. It provides the baseload that renewables can't. And it was abandoned under political pressure not because the evidence changed, but because the party system couldn't defend an unpopular truth.
Here's the irony: if we had stayed the course with nuclear, we'd actually have the clean energy binary this article wants. Nuclear for baseload, wind and solar for the rest. No gas dependency. No exposure to Middle Eastern price shocks. No desperate calls to drill a basin that's running dry. The debate today would be about how to balance two clean sources, not about whether to keep burning fossil fuels at all.
The party system didn't just fail to plan for the future. It actively destroyed a future that was already being built. And the system that killed Britain's nuclear programme is the same one being asked to deliver a thirty-year energy strategy now. A five-year election cycle will never deliver one.
Obviously increasing wind and solar (and fusion, if it ever happens) is a no-brainer, but the majority of vehicles and domestic central heating systems in Britain are powered by fossil fuels. The cost - and fossil fuels needed to create the products to achieve it - would be immense, and if done en masse would presumably consume considerable oil/gas and contribute to global warming. That's not to say the end-goal isn't worthy, but I don't think Britain will see a significant switch to electrification for transport and heating before they run out of accessibile fossil fuels.