Smoke and mirrors and CO2

OK, so while we're all waiting for CU's big news: today the Grauniad publishes a leaked DTI memo making it clear that there’s not a hope in global-warming hell that the UK will meet Blair’s much-vaunted target for renewable energy. Yep, we’re going to miss it by a mile.

What’s more, Blair knew this all along – but you guessed that anyway. (Presumably this leak has been cleared with McBroon, who definitely wasn’t even in the UK over the last 10 years, as we know, let alone Chancellor of the Exchequer with dominion over domestic policy.)

As it happens, the target for “renewables” – diseased carcasses and all – was a fatuous, if expensive, gesture all along. What’s fun, though, is to see the civil servants suggesting all manner of wheezes and cover-ups that ministers can use to wriggle off their self-inflicted hook. The Grauniad covers several juicy aspects – the “statistical interpretations of the target that would make it easier to achieve”, the plans to lobby Eurocrats for “flexibility-based options” (don’t you love civil service euphemisms).

But it’s worth reading the whole sordid 16 pages because there are other nuggets to be prospected:

● a wonderful piece of sophistry: if we were to meet our renewables target, we would trash the price of carbon emissions permits – so let’s not meet the target (I am not making this up)

● if we are to get even within sniffing distance of half of the renewables target it will only be by burning frankly infeasible amounts of biofuels, with a whole range of detrimental consequences (even George Monbiot agrees on this point)

● the DTI (as was) doesn’t reckon any Carbon Capture & Storage schemes (CCS) will be developed by 2020 (see earlier stories on this blog, where we reported Minister Malcolm Wicks assuring us they were profitable)

● neither is the government at all sure nucs will be economic ‘in the next decade or so’ - again, despite protestations to the contrary, including from McBroon himself

And so it goes on. The gap between rhetoric and actuality has rarely been bigger.

ND