Limit car ownership
From: Paul Muller, Woodthorpe Gardens, Sandal, Wakefield.
ONLY solar, wind and water power are kinds of renewable energy and there are issues with all of them.
Solar energy is renewable because the sun’s rays will never run out, but its energy has to be converted into mechanical power, which is only 10 per cent efficient. You would need a whole field of solar panels to run a small car a very short distance.
Wind-power is nothing more than a small contribution to our needs. Hydro-electric power from rivers or reservoirs requires large rivers; holding up their flow or large reservoirs and a lot of rain. Tidal-barrage power is reliable but cyclical, and also at some environmental cost. Wave power demands waves like wind power, they don’t arrive to timetables and are not always of the right power.
Meanwhile, the internal combustion engine is twice as efficient as any electric car.
So in order to reduce the levels of carbon dioxide and nitric oxide in the atmosphere we must stop producing so many vehicles. Nearly every family in the western world has two or three very large cars.
Things would improve if we only one small car per family, with each car to have a small high powered petrol engine. Improve public transport so that all people can get to and from their place of work easily.
This can be done if the car manufacturers can be persuaded to produce much smaller family cars with either small electric or small highly efficient petrol engines.
We must also develop many small nuclear power stations throughout the UK because once they are running they do not produce any carbon dioxide to cause climate change, as they do in France.