Green shoots and wind turbines
Some in Government and the City profess to see some green shoots of recovery but even if they're right unemployment is set on its relentless upward march for the rest of the year: this morning the latest figures show it rose a record 281,000 in the three months to May to 2.38m. At this rate it could be just shy of 3m by year-end.
The government in general - and Energy & Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband in particular - are pressing on with their "green" agenda, always more difficult in terms of public opinion when times are bad.
But the government has taken the novel line of claiming that the green agenda will actually help us get out of recession by creating new jobs. I appreciate you don't have to be a global warming sceptic to be sceptical of this.
Ed Miliband on BBC Radio Four's Today
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Mr Miliband forecasts there will be 400,000 "green" jobs by 2015, though such figures are never more than guesstimates and should always be treated with suspicion. No more so than this one because, as the Energy Secretary places ever more faith in wind power -- promising 15% of our energy needs will come from renewable resources by 2020 -- and as he pledges to make Britain a world leader in low-carbon technology, the country's only significant maker of wind turbines (the Vestas factory in the Isle of Wight) has announced it's closing, with a loss of over 600 jobs.
Vestas currently supplies the US market and couldn't get government help to convert its facilities to the requirements of the British market. So all 7,000 of the wind turbines that the government will say today it intends to install over the next decade look like they will be made in Germany, Denmark and China. Not quite when Mr Miliband had in mind, I'm sure, when he said we'd be a leader in low-carbon technology.
There are serious questions, too rarely asked, about wind power anyway. We've already spent several billion on building just over 2,000 wind turbines but they contribute barely 1% of our electricity; their combined output is only about 700 megawatts, less than the electricity generated by a single, medium-sized conventional power station. So even 7,000 more turbines won't necessarily make a huge contribution.
Nor do they come cheap. Electricity generated by turbines is about twice as expensive as that coming from conventional fossil-fuel generators. We're already paying, in effect, a turbine "supplement" in our electricity bills, though the extra cost isn't immediately clear on the statements. That extra cost will rise as turbines sprout.
There are also questions about the logistics: 7,000 on and offshore turbines between now and 2010 means, allowing for bad winter weather, installing two of them every week for the next 11 years ... each one roughly the size of the Blackpool Tower. Not sure we have the capability to do that -- but we'll see.
Finally an heretical question that is rarely asked at all in the mainstream media: are we right to continue to place so much emphasis on expensive anti-global warming policies when average temperatures have been lower than the 1998 peak for every one of the 10 years since then (and this year is forecast to be lower too)? It's the sort of question a growing band of sceptics are asking ever more loudly and we'll have one on this morning's Daily Politics. Oh yes, you get every opinion on good old DP!!
Anita Anand spoke to government chief scientific adviser Professor John Beddington on the calls for climate change action on last Friday's show
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