Last year, for the first time, Britain generated more electricity from wind turbines than from coal. According to Carbon Brief, a website that tracks developments in energy policy, coal accounted for 9.2% of the UK’s output in 2016, down from 22.6% the previous year; while wind accounted for 11.5%. As recently as 2013, coal accounted for more than 35% of the electricity supply in the UK, but the industry has been in rapid decline in the last few years, and the Government intends to close the country’s last coal-fired power plants by 2025. Last year’s drop in coal output was largely made up for by an increase in gas-generated power, which was up by around 50% from its 2015 level. Gas produces fewer carbon emissions than coal, and as a result of this switch, the UK’s CO2 emissions from power generation were 20% lower in 2016 than in 2015 ( Financial Times).

This movement towards clean energy now seems unstoppable.  Meanwhile, in the Great Oligarchy, pipelines, carrying dirty crude oil from Canada, are being resurrected in an assault on anything that looks as if it is countering climate change. The weasel words “I agree the climate is warming , but there is no agreement as to how much this is due to human activity” are being used to damn future generations to catastrophic weather patterns, food shortages, mass migration, numbers of simultaneous wars such as the world has never seen before,  and the extinction of hosts of animals. These shortsighted, profit-now-or- die, know- nothing, selfish deniers Are not even concerned about their own grandchildren.  Why care? They won’t be there to suffer with them.

May I at least suggest that each of us make some permanent note of the names and jobs of the people involved , leave the lists enclosed with our wills, to be handed down so that future generations will know who the people  were who have helped make miserable the lives of our descendants?  Maybe we could organise an Epicurean Great Wall of Shame?