Pleased to read a two-sided, proper, debate on climate change issues
I READ the report of GPEG’s lunch ‘presentation’ with great interest.
It was heartening to read of a ‘debate’ which actually allowed both sides of an argument to be aired.
Mr Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, while admitting that he was in favour of decarbonisation, expressed his view that the global energy costs should be of more immediate concern to us rather than the focus of achieving a target of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
‘Net zero is failing in many countries’, he said, ‘and costs are still sky-high’.
It costs thousands of pounds to install solar panels and even once they are installed it could be 15 to 20 years buyers in this part of the world see any sort of financial return.
It seems to me that, as I believe, solar panels only have a life-expectancy of 20 to 25 years, that one would have to repeat this expensive exercise too often to make it much of an investment.
From an environmental point of view, though these efforts might lead to a decrease in fossil-fuelled power, very little of these units can be safely recycled – so let’s send the defunct units off-island to a landfill site far away.
Putting the opposing argument, Mr Beebe, CEO of the Little Green Energy Company, rebutted Mr Peiser’s concerns.
‘I think most people on the island would disagree with Benny’s views’, he said.
Mr Beebe assured his listeners that climate change has already had a great impact on our environment – the island having lost 80 species of insect in the last 100 years. I am unaware if he provided no factual detail to back up that claim.
Mr Beebe would do well to consider that another source of renewable energy, wind generation, is said to be responsible for the deaths of thousands (if not more) birds and bats.
That is presumably acceptable to the green lobby (who see and hear no evil, but talk a lot of it just to make up).
We’ll just have to hope and pray that the French will be kind to us in our hours of need when wind and solar prove that they can’t ever meet our needs.
P N HUGO