Stop criticising governments resisting oil and gas giants - Yorkshire Post Letters
From: Gareth Robson, Kent House Road, Beckenham.
I congratulate Dave Haskell, from the lovely Welsh-English border country, for his letter (published in The Yorkshire Post on July 3) exploring ways we can move to better energy sources which are less damaging to the climate.
It's a shame he knocks Ed Miliband, because as far as I can see the Energy Minister is sincere and has similar motives to Dave's - do all we can to keep the lights on whilst reducing climate damage.
‘Net zero’ is indeed, as Dave implies, a baffling and complicated-sounding expression. It's a shame nobody came up with something less off-putting.
It just means "don't increase the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere". Maybe something like "Don't increase CO2". Not as catchy, but less off-putting. It's the "net" bit that puts people off, I think. Sounds like "internet" or "network" but it's net as in "one thing minus the other".
In this case CO2 added to the atmosphere minus CO2 removed (for instance by the long-promised Carbon Capture and Storage where we hope to remove CO2 from the atmosphere or from power-station chimneys and pump it into old oil wells under the sea or underground - I keep my fingers crossed).
The promise being "we can continue to add CO2 to the atmosphere as long as we remove the same amount". Let's hope it works but in the meantime let's reduce how much oil and gas we burn, mainly through other ways of generating electricity (wind-power, sun-power, yes maybe some geo-thermal and tidal, and - I'm not sure whether I really like the idea - more nuclear power).
Nobody is saying we are going to rely completely on these sources of energy - apart from nuclear they are intermittent, as stated by Dave in his letter - but every time we use them we stop another bit of CO2 being added to the air.
I hope people will stop knocking these ideas and criticising the governments around the world who are trying hard to resist the oil and gas giants who just want us to keep buying and burning their products. Reducing CO2 is life and death to the generations who will (hopefully) live long after us.