The Labor government has arrived with great impatience to make quick decisions, and its megamajority has had to sweep through a series of hasty and ill-considered changes. Nowhere is this more evident than in the power box.
Before a single MP was sworn in, Milliband had allowed more than 6,000 acres of solar installations on farmland, arguing that rural communities simply had to absorb them. But why this absurd race for solar energy? Why take the step before publishing a land use strategy?
We are a small island, with around 60% self-sufficiency in food production. Food security is national security. But not for the Labour Party, whose paltry 87 words about agriculture and rural affairs in its manifesto simply turn out to see rural communities as structural sites and not as the engine room of food production.
I have long argued that to defossilize and decarbonize our energy and fuels, there are other, better ways. We do not want to greet the first generation available.
It takes about 2,000 acres of solar panels to produce, when the sun is shining, enough electrical power for 50,000 homes (as it stands, before everyone is forced to own two Teslas). By contrast, a small modular reactor only needs two football fields. and it will generate enough electricity to build one million houses. How can anyone rationally take those two characteristics and solar energy?
Likewise, there is a curious obsession with electric power from vehicle batteries, in a market where early adopters have peaked and are possibly even now receding.
Even after the sale of new gasoline and diesel is banned, around 1. 4 billion internal combustion engine vehicles will still be on the road.
Our leading innovators and scientists have developed fossil-free and carbon-neutral artificial fuels. Where is the government’s enthusiasm for adopting this generation? Not only for cars, but also for trucks, boats, airplanes, agricultural machinery and much more? This attitude remains stuck in the past, in a nascent generation that slightly turns the heads of consumers in the genuine market.
To achieve true long-term, blank energy solutions, this attitude will have to change. And in its first weeks, the Labor Party is, as always, stuck in the past.
Greg Smith is the Mid-Bucks Conservative MP
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