What do you think?
Is Boris right to be away on holiday this week? Join the debate by emailing letters@westerndailypress.co.uk and including your name and address
their treatment and the rest of us will have to get in an ever lengthening queue and hope that our problem doesn’t kill us before we can see a specialist.
Meanwhile, Boris jets off on holiday, leaving behind empty supermarket shelves, escalating fuel prices, etc, but as he says it’s not up to him to put things right! He’s only the prime minister!
Tom Coleman
Bridgwater
Currently, it is widely believed that we are suffering an energy crisis.
It is an irrefutable scientific fact that converting from one form of energy to another invariably involves losses of some kind.
Internal combustion engines convert chemical energy into mechanical energy and many designs are described as being efficient, but are anything but.
Most will achieve a thermal efficiency of only around 20%, so four-fifths is wasted, this is mostly as heat.
Electricity is said by many to be the way forward, yet much of it is currently produced from gas and then transmitted to domestic homes, where much of it is converted back into heat, further increasing inefficiencies.
Even that produced from hydro electric schemes is to a degree inefficient and transmission, even at high voltages, involves further losses, with pumped storage schemes involving even more inefficiencies. Nuclear generation of electricity normally uses prodigious amounts of sea or river water for cooling, which again is a major source of waste.
Employers are often criticised for having low productivity, yet our misuse of energy is a prime contributor to inefficiencies and adds to climatic change, which in turn usually requires yet more energy to combat.
In short, we live in a very wasteful world.
All the signs are that we will continue to do so for a long time into the future.
Anthony G Phillips
Salisbury