A plan at last
IT took a war to get it produced but Britain finally has an energy strategy . . . 15 years late.
Our fear now is that the nation won’t buy into it.
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First, let us welcome plans for up to eight new nuclear plants — though we’ll believe those only when we see them.
They are vital to any Net Zero future in a country where wind and sun are intermittent, even though vastly increasing our solar and wind capacity makes sound sense too.
While all that is being built we will need more home-produced oil and gas from the North Sea.
A successful review into fracking’s safety will help hugely too. The sooner we get on with it the better.
But there are three problems with all this.
One is the eco extremists — who are both in denial about the limits of renewables here and delusional about the vast cost of insulating homes and offices.
They are already outraged, detest any increase in fossil fuel energy and will doubtless try to halt it in court and glue their heads to motorways.
Meanwhile millions of NIMBYs, already blocking new homes for young people, will do the same with solar farms, onshore wind, nuclear plants and shale gas sites, helped by the craven opportunists of Labour and the Lib Dems.
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Then come Tory MPs: A virtually unmanageable rabble holding wildly varying beliefs and — despite their huge majority — far more terrified of voters than of Government whips.
It all risks paralysis.
But this strategy is vital — not to slash our bills now but eventually to make us self-sufficient and safe from blackmail by tyrants.
Boris Johnson must convince the public, perhaps via Covid-style TV broadcasts, why it is so badly needed.
Puny blow
DOES the UN imagine Putin in tears over his exclusion from its Human Rights Council?
Grand gestures may seem worthwhile to this impotent talking shop.
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They serve no real purpose.
Expelling Russia from the UN would make a more potent point.
But even that wouldn’t bother him.
Putin craves a new empire across Europe.
His Ukraine war is far from over.
He will stop at nothing, especially not the execution of civilians — now a cast-iron fact which shames his idiot apologists and supporters.
Only defeat, or bankruptcy via our sanctions, will stop him.
How can Germany defend buying his gas?
Party time
THE astonishing age-reversal breakthrough at Cambridge is a holy grail of science potentially worth billions.
It could make us look decades younger, tackle illnesses like Alzheimer’s and heal wounds much faster.
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Lab tests have already turned back the clock for three middle-aged folk.
Now they’re on the Xbox all day.
