In this blog post Dan Van der Horst explores our very human relationship with energy. He challenges us to peek over the garden fence at the smorgasbord of sustainable energy practices being creatively devised and adopted by our European Neighbours. Dan argues that a ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ attitude may well be what we need to inspire us to reimagine our Nation’s energy options – and may even motivate us to aspire to be future leaders in the sustainable energy market.
Energy is like blood; we can’t do without it but we don’t want to see it. When it comes to the energy debate, much of the focus is about what we don’t want. There are backbenchers who don’t want wind farms in one’s pleasant green, and parties who proclaim they don’t like nuclear. Where there was once a political reluctance to depend on domestic coal, these days our dependency on oil or gas from parts of Asia does not sit comfortably either. Collectively we sound almost like a protest party; blaming the government du jour or politicians in general, distrustful of those foreign ‘Big Six’, we want power returned to us, without too much of a plan as to how that’s done. . Some of us have dreams, for sure; fracking revolution, 100% renewables, nuclear renaissance, take your pick. And then we are rudely woken up by another IPCC report about climbing emissions and pathetic little mitigation and adaptation to date.
