Building or Burning the Bridges to a Sustainable Energy Policy

Abstract

For those interested in the areas of energy and environmental policy within the United Kingdom, there has been a bit of a ‘phoney war’ going on over recent years. The energy review of 2003 left the nuclear energy option open but said ‘not yet’. Then the government said that there would be a decision about whether to go down the ‘new build’ route within the current parliament. At the Labour Party conference in Brighton in September 2005, the prime minister mentioned the ‘n word’ as a potential means of ensuring security of energy supplies at a time when oil prices have risen, China has become the third largest consumer of fossil fuels and global warming is being blamed for everything from Hurricane Katrina to a fear of the demise of champagne production in France. And then amidst great excitement and angst a UK Energy Review was announced – and something depressingly familiar happened