Mindboggling

I'm at the UKIP party conference today and just by chance this story turns up in the Register.

A former chief scientific advisor to the government has said that EU renewable-energy quotas will cause widespread fuel poverty. Sir David King believes that European heads of state, in agreeing the targets, may have mistaken electricity usage for total energy consumption - leading to overly ambitious and expensive goals being set.

The question is, how did we end up with a target of 20% of all energy from renewables? Given that almost all renewable generation methods, as well as being horrendously expensive, are suited more to electricity generation than anything else like transport or heating.

So, why was the target of all energy, not electricity alone?

King believes that the EU heads of state may only have meant to sign up to 20 per cent of electricity being renewable, not 20 per cent of all energy used.

"I think there was some degree of confusion at the heads of states meeting dealing with this," he told the Beeb.

"If they had said 20 per cent renewables on the electricity grids across the European Union by 2020, we would have had a realistic target... saying 20 per cent of all energy, I actually wonder whether that wasn't a mistake. I was rather surprised when I heard what the decision was."

The answer seems to be that, umm, they simply didn't know what they were doing.

A great way to run a continent, don't you think? Make sure that the incompetents rise to the top and make silly decisions when there.

Brings to mind the (possibly apocryphal) story about bycatches.

Currently more fish are thrown dead over the side than are legally landed across the EU. This happens because those crafting the rules in the first place were so dim (or, in fairness, ill informed) that they didn't realise that fish, once caught, are dead.

They thought they were insisting that live fish be thrown back: the result is that we kill more than twice what we eat....not sustainable perhaps?