Technologies such as carbon capture are still at an experimental stage so we must lower our energy consumption - Yorkshire Post Letters

Over the past few days, we have witnessed a flurry of political activity over the government's plans to mitigate climate change, following the court decision that the existing plans were not adequate.

We have heard of ambitions and intentions, but how much is based on grounded reality?

To speak (as many are doing) of "Carbon Capture and storage" as if it were a practical reality is self-delusional at best; these technologies are still at the experimental stage and laboratory scale, and nowhere in the world are there industrial companies capable of installing the necessary massive machinery. The best we can offer is a vague hope about the coming decades.

We hear that old mine workings under the North Sea will store carbon dioxide, presumably as carbonates or dry ice, but surely, such stores must be seen as decidedly finite; what happens when they are full and we are still frantically burning fossil fuels as before?

The big, and most difficult, problem is that we as a nation seem still to be expecting to consume energy at the rate we do now. This is simply not viable. We must all face the hard truth that individual and collective consumption must be drastically reduced if we stand any chance of relying on renewables wholly to replace fossil fuels.