Ö÷²„“óŠć

This is going to be very interesting indeed, over time. The bit which interests me most is the last bit about joining up with the French. Britain and France love to bicker and bring up ancient battles, but what is now at stake is the future of our economy and even our standard of living, civilisation, whatever.

Whether the French taxpayers are going to be thrilled about subsidising Perfidious Albion is a moot point. But we are all in an increasingly difficult position with regard to energy supply: the Middle East and Russia are unstable. Any major sulk with either geo-political entity could make Western Europe even more vulnerable than it already is.

We all love the Yanks, and they us, but are they going to have enough spare gas, oil, whatever, to send a bit over the pond during a major crisis? Fiddling about with the price of carbon fuels is, no doubt, good economics in peace time, but should there be war with Iran or an Islamist coup in Saudi, we'll need all the fuel we can lay our hands on, however polluting it may be.

Nuclear power plants take years to build, so the investment must be clear, reliable, unequivocal and quickly in place. If you have too many year-long committees involving all parties and being jolly fair to the renewables lobby and so on, we may already be in a major fuel crisis with our trousers half down, i.e. our expensive and not-yet-working power plants only half built. Time is of the essence ("essence" is French for petrol, by the way).

We therefore have to think about a major geo-political reality: can we rely on the French more than the Russians, or the Americans, to provide us with fuel when we need it? We can save a bit by doing a Justin Rowlatt, but this is a serious dilemma for industry and transport in a country of some 60 million people, not the Isle of Man.

The current price of a *gallon* of car fuel in the US averages around $3.2 on the West Coast, and $2.90 overall.

The average price of a gallon of car fuel in the UK is currently $6.58 (at an exchange rate of 1:1.84) - or more than twice that of the US.

While high gas prices do have a marginal effect on consumption, they tend to penalize the poorest in the community - especially through indirect mechanisms e.g. increased transport costs passed on to the consumer.

"Alternative" fuel may have some impact on fossil fuel consumption and carbon emmission in the US and Europe, but cultural and lifestyle changes are more important.

A culture where an SUV is not seen as a status symbol, but as a marker of a selfish and destructive character would, maybe, be heading the right direction.

Consumers are only a part of the problem, of course, and long-term solutions to the energy demands of business (such as the radical steps being taken by companies like DuPont at high initial costs) are equally important.

The Areva EPR model has a capacity of 1.6 GW (gigawatts) - see your own link above.

You probably meant to write 1.6 MW (megawatts), which underestimates the capacity of a nuclear power station by three orders of magnitude. Even a large modern wind turbine can generate well over 2 MW of electrical power.

A pedant would also insist that capitalization of SI units is important: a lowercase "m" prefix means "milli", or one-thousandth of a unit; capital M is used for mega (a million units).

They might also point out that the watt is abbreviated to the uppercase W, and a space should separate the number and the symbol. For more on the joys of SI writing style, see:

Comparisons are made difficult when so many units are employed. Oil is knocking $76 per barrel, things are measured in gallons in one place, in litres elsewhere. As we see from Gavin's recent posting, people are nonchalent about GWs and MWs, and we now know that capital letters mean something. And there are dollars, euros, pounds.

Would it not be nice if standardised units are used so that we intelligent lay people, neither technicians nor economists, could make rational judgements?

One layman's question from me: why is car fuel twice as expensive in Britain as opposed to the USA? What are the mechanisms involved?

Given the war in the Lebanon, and its instantaneous effect on oil prices, as I read in the Belgian press just now, we'd better start making those energy solutions, that have been kicked into the long grass for decades, something of a greater priority.

Forget Blair's career for a moment, and think of the energy interests of 60 million people over the next decades, which could be quite stormy in the Middle East where we get a lot of fuel from. And surely a rise in oil prices directly affects the relative cost of cleansing fossil fuels and keeping them as an option, the relative cost of nuclear waste disposal, the relative cost of renewables.

Are our economists taking realities such as war, blockades, people blowing up pipelines, Russian blackmail, and other real-life things into account when doing their costing calculations?

I hope some of you economists, scientists and geo-politically inclined intellectuals watched the Horizon programme just now (21:00-21:50, 13th July 2006) on Ö÷²„“óŠć2 about the detrimental effects of low doses of radiation exposure. We don't, of course, know who paid for it, and the Greens are bound to say immediately it was part of a secretly funded propaganda drive by the nuclear lobby, but it did make me think.

The conclusion was that up to a certain threshold, radiation does not cause the damage to living creatures (including human beings) that popular myth thinks it does, implying that there was an enormous amount of hysteria surrounding the Chornobyl disaster in 1986.

This has significant implications for the promotion, or rejection, of nuclear power as a fuel for Britain over the next few decades. I hope Britain can keep away from party-political point scoring and get on with securing our power supplies. (Though saving energy is just as important as it always was.)

I don't want to have to pedal a generator treadmill in ten years' time, each time I want to use my computer or watch telly. (Books I can read by candlelight.)

So: what's happened with all the powerful intellects on this blog, people with all those cerebral and complex good ideas? Watching CNN (I don't restrict my viewing to the Ö÷²„“óŠć), I see that share prices appear to be universally down. Everybody knows that if the war spreads to Syria and, less likely, Iran, oil prices will go through the roof.

While everyone is wittering on about megawatts (mega-whats?), the price of fuel could start a mini-recession. Unless the IDF is kind enough to stop its anti-terrorist activities on Wednesday, that is.

What are the real-time solutions, o great wisdomic gurus of economics? Because as no one was prepared for the IDF-Hizbullah showdown, no one managed to build a few reserve nuclear power stations or get the windy-whirlers and Cameroonian roof panels going. The only solution is, of course, the politically unpalatable, but Realpolitikally realistic, one of sucking up to Czar Putin in the hope that he won't sulk and cut off oil supplies to his greatest allies (lick, lick, we are your friends, o great Russian prince of intelligence and beauty) and then muddle along as usual.

Let's face it, we don't care about the GuLags and Russian slavery, as long as we have enough fuel to warm up the chip pans and laptops.

Yours cynically, dot-dot-dot...