The Catch 22 of the Green Agenda

Let's get one thing straight, we need energy. How we provide this energy is anything but straight though. The world has pretty much agreed that oil isn't a long term solution, not least because we'll have burned it all. So we'll burn all the coal until that is gone, and suffer the political turmoil of supplying natural gas until we can no longer rely on that.

So what does that leave us? We need to either reduce our energy consumption or get new types of power"station" hooked up to the grid which broadly speaking means renewables or nuclear.

Let's deal with the former first. Yes we should be ensuring that our energy consumption is as low as possible but civilisation simply doesn't want to regress so even with more efficient technology the imminent rise of the electric car, huge new markets for everything from industrial machinery to consumer gadgets opening up in developing countries and countless other factors putting demand on the global electricity supply in general terms the amount of electricity required to power the planet particularly post-oil is unlikely to fall.

Nuclear is some sort of energy supply bogeyman after a couple of high profile disasters so let's put that aside for a minute.

So we invest in renewables right? Well yes we do but will solar and wind farms really be able to reliably deliver the global electricity demand? In the future perhaps but short term we need to improve the technology which requires R&D and manufacturing which requires...energy. So let's be ideal-amentalist for a minute and assume that we are adopting a 100% renewables agenda - we find ourselves racing against time to produce a viable renewable solution before we are hindered by lack of availability of existing energy supplies with which to perform the development work.

Biofuels have a nice easy-marketing ring about them until you consider the amount of land that would need to be given over to growing crops for fuel and the resulting deforestation.

So this brings us back to nuclear. Negative pr caused by a couple of disasters has pretty much made nuclear an unviable proposition for political reasons and previously the high cost relative to coal and oil has made it non-viable for economic reasons despite it being the cleanest technology capable of providing for our power hungry planet.

"But what about the radioactive waste" - well I'm a firm believer that if the world hadn't given up on Nuclear post-Chernobyl then the rate of progress and investment in the technology would have found a solution for that by now. Even if it was sending the waste into space on electric rockets.

It's not ideal but for the short term we've got to accept that there is no "Green" way to provide the energy we need so however unpalatable we can only find the least bad solution.