Whither green?

Readers of this blog (if there are any) might assume that I am an environmentalist, that I vote for the Greens and that the description 'tree hugger' would sit well on me. In fact I don't see myself as a 'Green', at least not in the conventional sense.

I do see myself as a technophile who believes in the ability of technology, if applied intelligently, to make our lives on this planet much more fulfilling and comfortable; and there's the important bit - intelligently. Not that I see myself as much of an intellectual heavyweight. Quite the opposite. My qualifications mark me as an also-ran lightweight and I marvel at the ability of true intellectuals to quickly marshall thoughts, memories and knowledge into coherent analyses of situations. I have to mull over things for ages.

However, I do seem to have a sense for the direction things ought to go to promote maximum happiness (How American is that?) and I am often surprised when my antennae are proved to have been right, even when I'm horribly outvoted or out-shouted on an issue. This is how I feel about the issues surrounding solar-generated electricity.

Environmentalism first. I think a clean, fresh environment is a good thing and I don't believe businessess have a right to dirty our planet in pursuit of short-term profit. But the rantings of many environmentalists bother me. Specifically, they seem to say that anything human is unnatural, almost as if we don't have a right to live on this planet. I believe we have a right to grow, multiply and consume as much as the bacteria that regularly manage to colonise my damp dishcloth. But like them, our growth will be limited by the resources available. The difference between us and the bugs is our intellect.

I think it is fundamentally stupid of us as a civilisation to treat coal and oil as energy sources. It is short-sighted, dirty and is essentially us burning our capital. It is a huge mistake for our governments and big business to have conspired to deplete these resources when unimaginable vast amounts of energy are all around. Just because burning this stuff was an easy path to take, does not make it the right thing to have done and I don't say this as someone who has swallowed the CO2 and the global warming case; hook, line and sinker. Coal and oil should be a capital resource, not a consumable. As a civilisation, we ought to take it out of our energy portfolio and invest in the rest.

Green politics next. I worry that political structures constructed around single issues will always tend towards extreme viewpoints as their proponents bicker and argue themselves to a purer interpretation of their ideal. I also don't like the Westminster version of democracy - winner takes all. Advocates point out that it leads to strong government and my face falls. The last thing we need is a strong government hammering home its policies on pathetic mandates. We ought to force these folk to share their power to dilute it so that little legislation gets passed until there really is a strong groundwell in its favour. I prefer the Liberal Democrats over the Greens as I believe their wider political viewpoint, less tainted by issues of left and right, is a safer bet. But as soon as they get too big, I'll have no problem with ditching them.

Tree huggers. Actually I do have some sympathies here. The term 'tree hugger' is often used as a perjorative term for people who take their environmentalism to silly extremes but it equally applies to people, like me, with a scientific outlook who understand that both organisms, us and trees, share the chemical miracle that is DNA and life on Earth. It was planetary scientist and science populariser Carl Sagan who pointed out in his TV series 'Cosmos' that, at the cores of our cells, we and trees are made of the same stuff. That's important to remember.

So I approach renewable energy as a practical technological solution to our need for energy. I think the FiT scheme to encourage renewable electricity generation is the best sign that I've seen that UK politicians are beginning to come around to smarter ways of doing things.