Rick Lowe

I'm all for going green voluntarily. Yes voluntarily and in time.

I do not believe government should attempt to force it down our throats with our money. Sure they can cajole, ask, suggest etc, but after all the ideas that have improved our standard of living over the years have come from the bottom up, not the top down, as a general rule.

But I digress.

You might recall a couple posts previously about Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, from which I offer the following quote from pages 343 detailing what Britain would look like if it attempted to power itself without fossil fuels with the technology that is presently available:

There would be sixty nuclear power stations around the coasts, wind farms would cover 10 per cent of the entire land (or a big part of the sea), there would be solar panels covering an area the size of Lincolnshire, eighteen Greater Londons growing bio-fuels, forty-seven New Forests growing fast-rotation harvested timber, hundreds of miles of wave machines off the coast, huge tidal barrages in the Severn estuary and Strangford Lough, and twenty-five times as many hydro dams on rivers as there are today. The prospect is unappetising: the entire country would look like a power station, pylons would march across the roads. Power cuts would be frequent – imagine a still, cold foggy day in January when the slack tide in the Servern estuary coincides with peak demand, when the solar panels are dead and the wind turbines still. Wildlife would suffer from the loss of estuaries, free-flowing rivers and open country. Powering the world with such renewables now is the surest way to spoil the environment. (Of course, coal mining and oil drilling can and do spoil the environment too, but compared with most renewables their footprints are surprisingly small for the energy they yield).

And none of this takes the cost of renewables into consideration.

I would suggest that it is better to continue with oil at this time even at $5.00 or more per gallon. And, $5.00 for a gallon of gas is cheaper than a gallon of fancy table water isn't it?

So I'm all for going green in time and voluntarily.