Response to the UK Low Carbon Transition Plan

Beginning with the first element of Ed Miliband's 'Energy Trinity', investment in wind and tidal energy is long overdue good news. However, at lb180 million or 23 per cent of the estimated lb775m annual bonus package for staff at the failed Royal Bank of Scotland, we have to question how far the rhetoric is matched by real commitment.

Nuclear power, now given the green light, poses serious unsolved problems to do with long-term waste, cost, inflexibility and international security. In any event, it couldn't deliver in time to meet the real world target set, not by government, but by the atmosphere - of reducing concentrations of CO₂ in the atmosphere to 350ppm.Neither can the climate system wait for unproven carbon capture and storage technology to come on line.

The answer for coal must be elegantly simple. Leave it in the ground.

The first part of the Energy Trinity is vastly under-resourced; the other two are of a different nature entirely. They are a dangerous diversion which, if we follow, would undermine efforts to preserve the climatic conditions under which civilisation emerged. Remove them and focus resources on the transformation of our aging energy infrastructure, massive scale-out of proven renewable technologies, the transformation of our building stock and the creation of a low vehicle transport system and the plan might begin to look like the Green New Deal our environment and our economy so urgently needs.