Britain has an energy crisis looming. Especially with the severe (and calculatable) financial problems with Nuclear. Short term, the visible 'fix' is to make the UK dependant upon imported gas, and all the implications that dependency implies. To me, climate change is very important, but what annoys me is that sense has been replaced with a load of polarising non-constructive political spin about it from both sides. NOBODY seems to deny that non renewable energy sources are running out, or that future generations will need energy. Their energy sources are simply going to have to be renewable. To what extent this generation can make climate change problems worse for them is irrelevant to this statement. A lot of research needs to be done to make renewable energy reliable and not cost prohibitive. The next generation can't do this with energy costs getting out of control and dealing with even bigger short term crises. In actual fact, a side effect of 'green energy policies' has been to sponsor this research, and a 'tipping point' is much closer than people realise. By this, I mean the point at which reliable renewable energy costs WITHOUT SUBSIDIES falls below that of non-renewable energy sources WITHOUT SUBSIDIES (important - do not ignore the fact that direct and indirect subsidies are put into these sources as well). Once that happens, the pathetically run renewable energy/non renewable energy climate change debate should become mute.
The important point is that technological research into renewable energy NEEDS to be encouraged even if only for pure economic reasons. No decent research makes a big return to the bottom line in the next couple of years, but it IS close enough now to encourage commercial investment.
Britain has a true reputation, of producing brilliant innovative brains, that end up going elsewhere, so elsewhere is the beneficiary of their work. This is throughout history, as well as more markedly, the 1970s 'brain drain' caused by really bad British policies. Britain, and in particular Wales needs to encourage this type of brain, and benefit from the infrastructure they create.
Therefore a very important topic for research is currently the energy crisis. It is also a topic, ideally suited for Wales, and not a short-term one, where the only real beneficiaries are foreign big corporations that then pull out. The research needs to be into electrical energy storage, alternative fuels that augment and not compete with food production, transport infrastructure (both physical and energy), etc.
Fracking and nuclear are economically very similar:- Big investment with unforeseen problems causing costs to escalate to an area where only momentum keeps them going with pressure for short term cuts. A limited period where running costs are good, followed by a long term problem for future generations. (Fracking:-The direct economic cost of carbon anti-sequestration is undeniable whether or not dwarfed by other debatable factors.) Either could go wrong into a catastrophe. Nuclear is not really a renewable energy. Neither of these are a sensible place to put investment when the tipping point for renewable is so close. Rather let us encourage British Entrepreneurs to invest in, and government to directly invest into bringing the 'renewable energy tipping point' into the near future, put the climate change debate in its present polarising form to bed for evermore, and make centres of excellence in Wales and elsewhere for products the rest of the world will soon be clamouring for.
We won't fix the energy crisis any other way. Intensifying research into renewable will produce a huge economic benefit for this generation, and minimise our climate change impact for future generations.