Prof Chris Greig: "The debate about energy is not balanced, we’re in this situation where carbon emissions and climate impacts gets most of the coverage, energy cost too, so if we see rising electricity prices or we see rising fuel prices it’s front page news.  But most of the commentary doesn’t look at the complete picture of how to supply energy at the scale we need it and in a cost effective way that’s reliable, available and environmentally sustainable.  Until we get the public understanding how all of those work together, we’re gonna have this imbalanced debate.  So it’s actually one of my pet projects if you like at the university is to find ways to disseminate information into schools, into university sector and into the public where we can get people who understand what energy choices they have, they understand where the resources come from, the scale of the availability of those resources, whether or not they’re continuously available or are they intermittent, what are the technology challenges to deploy some of these technologies.  So most of the people in society aren’t aware of these things and so they rely on headlines and newspaper articles which are usually provided by either journalists seeking a headline or by advocacy groups who are pushing a particular barrow.  And we need to try and correct that flow of information so that society is informed.  This is a big, big challenge if we’re going to actually get coherent long term policy out of government."

Categories: Economy, Energy Choices, Energy Concerns
Author: Prof. Chris Greig