There is a chill in the atmosphere in my room. The wood and smokeless fuel, now burning in the stove, chase away the immediate threat of discomfort and in the glowing warmth, a different perspective on energy emerges from my imagination.
Please come and stand with me on the top of Pen-Bal-Crag, in front of Tynemouth Priory, overlooking the mouth of the River Tyne. We must now travel back in time in one-thousand-year leaps, to 12,000 years ago. The piers vanish immediately and the shoreline advances out to the north and east. There are rivers and lakes, swamp and wandering amongst them the megafauna; woolly rhinoceros, mammoth and elk. The sea level has dropped by hundreds of feet. There, just a mile offshore is a small group of thatched huts in a clearing of hazel, oak and ash, marked out by the wood smoke, emerging from their midst.
The peoples of the stone age have the exact same priorities as myself, more so, given that life expectancy is more than halved, short and brutal.
Through the eyes of the time travellers, we now move in reverse time. The rivers and lakes become more evident and metre by metre, bog by marsh, the North Sea recovers Dogger land and behind us, are the last of the glaciers retreating north and west to the Cheviot hills. We now move rapidly through the age of metals; the trees fall and in the blink of an eye there is industry and ever shaped by the movement of water North and South Shields, Jarrow and Hebburn are inundated!
Then travelling thousands of years into the future the whole process of global warming is reversed and the interglacial period ends, the summers cool and over millennia, land emerges once more from the sea. A bird’s eye view to the North East reveals the sculptures of windmills past, swathes of undersea cables for electricity, gas and communications. The interdependence of all the states surrounding this new land mass is revealed amongst the carnage of sunken vessels and reckless plastic waste.
Interglacial period?
This can be seen as reasonable conjecture; my hope is that our descendants adapt and survive to have long and peaceful lives, with fossil fuel-free energy sources. To achieve this ultimate goal, governments of all persuasions must invest to protect their people, and the most vulnerable in society. Today, those people who can afford to burn fossil fuels at home are doing the best they can under the circumstances. The installation of new technologies from solar, wind to heat source pumps has an expense. Whatever is manufactured, made and installed has a carbon cost too, even to the point of stalling or preventing the next glacial period predicted.
A future for coal, until hell freezes over?
The UK has abandoned the mining of coal and yet imports have increased to supply homes like mine, since 1996. Equally, in the twenty first century, which ever local supermarket or garage forecourt you wander into, you can purchase coal, kindling or logs. The demand is there, if you have the luxury of a multifuel stove; you know and manage first-hand the heating supply. The consumer is reacting to market forces, because the first principle of citizens and governments is to keep ‘your’ people happy; to achieve that the priorities are the provision of affordable shelter, food and warmth. The increased cost of importing wood chip from the USA, gas or electricity from offshore, through undersea cables at fluctuating market prices, undermines that directive and tends to fuel only inflation, the one factor that truly affects the cost of living and compromises people’s choice.
On no accord?
Russian ships dragging anchors through undersea cables in the Baltic Sea or mapping cables or supply lines, that surround and connect the UK to Europe are now a more widely-known symptom, of that twentieth century phenomenon, the Cold War. Whether, geopolitical or energy poverty at home, this conflict has to be the number one priority of the Labour government. The dependence on a small number of gas-powered electricity suppliers, when solar and wind production fall foul of calm cloudy weather was revealed within the past two weeks, just four months after the closure of the last coal-fired power station.
The government is clearly not in sufficient control of the electricity supply of this country, with respect to regulation or cost. There has to be a strategic return to coal, mined in this country, despite a popular, but misinformed view that it is the worst of carbon dioxide pollution producing fossil fuels. Trump has dumped the Paris accord, America, Russia, Germany and China are increasing their dependence on oil, gas and coal mining. This is the harsh reality as we wait for a new clean-cheap energy saviour. Ed Miliband, is going to have to make that U-turn soon, because too little action too late on energy supply in the UK, is already having significant impact on industrial and domestic energy costs, both of which will increase the future borrowing requirements. In my recent articles on energy supply and the true carbon cost of so called, greener power supplies in the UK, the chilling facts remain the same; invest in new technologies, but nuclear and coal, will just have to do to sustain the needs of this country.
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