Writer needs a reality check...

I’m still trying to work out if Mr Hawkes’ letter last week, deriding alternative energy, was just a satirical mickey-take.

I can’t believe that anyone can be in doubt that our planet faces a major crisis if nothing is done to stop the release of greenhouse gases.

We have seen increasing extreme weather in this country over recent years – the massive bush fires on every continent this year show that we cannot continue in the same way.

And now Pakistan has suffered the most tragic flooding as a result of the chaotic weather patterns that are developing.

When the industrial revolution started, no-one knew what the consequence of burning fossil fuels would be to our climate.

But there is now no excuse.

The overwhelming majority of scientists warn of us that we have a very short period of time to prevent a catastrophic change.

Our children and their children face a future which is very bleak unless we do something now.

Unfortunately our government (do we have one?) seems intent on making things worse.

The Jackdaw gas field is being prepared to increase the gas we burn, the Cambo oil field which was going to be left untouched is now being lined up to increase the burning of oil and that ridiculous idea of fracking is being revived.

When will politicians focus on a future that provides for the next generations?

We need renewables to be developed quickly along with battery storage and other methods of energy storage.

We need cheap or free public transport that meets the transport needs of the public so we find it is better to use buses, trams and trains rather than private motorcars.

COP27 takes place in November; I hope world leaders come up with better plans than they did last November in Glasgow.

I doubt they will, unless a number of us start to protest and demand change.

Derek Hawkes – who wrote in last week – might have had a rethink on the reality of climate change with the unprecedented Pakistan flooding, though I doubt it.

Due to circumstances I didn’t have the chance to read the letter by Kevin Bennett that has so rattled Mr Hawkes, so I will simply address his absurdities.

He says ‘renewables are unreliable’ and there will be ‘zero output’.

The UK has a ‘national grid’, if the wind drops in one place it will be active somewhere else, so zero output is about as likely as Mr Hawkes talking sense.

My brother once ended his fishing because it was bucketing down. When he got back to his car, the front was being pounded but he opened the boot in the dry.

Bad weather ends somewhere, and somewhere else energy would be being pumped into the system. We have a country-wide network and if wind dies in Doncaster it can be mighty in Morecambe.

I remember being out and walking to school in ‘peasoupers’. A peasouper, for the uninitiated, is when you get thick fog that stops coal smoke from escaping and so the smoke mixes with the fog making it a snotty yellow.

You breathe in the sulphur, smoke and soot particles trapped by the fog, I’m sure you can imagine being forced to breathe in stuff we campaign to eliminate, now.

Where it’s eliminated, let it stay eliminated. When I walked out into such a smog in 1970, aged 16, taking the ashes to the bin, I remember thinking ‘we’ve been burning coal for the last 150 years and it must, surely, have an impact on the atmosphere at some point’.

I had no idea I was already inside the impacts.

Of renewables, when they are touted as ‘the cheapest source of energy’, one of his absurdities is not realising that the operative word is ‘source’, not ‘price’, as he portrays.

Coal costs a fortune to get out of the ground from hundreds of metres down, the ‘source’, for coal, is extracted in troglodyte conditions and it too requires effort to clean, remove the non-combustible and other unwanted materials.

While it’s true that the infrastructure has to be paid for, the same was true for coal, and would be again.

The ‘sources’, however, are actually free: wind, sun, sea tides, wave ‘rocker generators’, etc.

Also, the workers operate in much safer conditions on the surface of the planet than with hundreds of metres of straining rock wanting to, and often succeeding, in collapsing onto miners’ heads.

How many of today’s enlightened and social media-connected youngsters would go down your magic new mines, because you can’t ‘reopen’ old ones, they are well out of our reach.

We might need candles this winter, probably will, but it is not ‘renewables’ that will cause that, otherwise it would have happened in preceding winters.