Yup, I know of pelamis – serious feat of engineering (that seems to fairly frequently upset the engineers by breaking!).
Unfortunately the view that Moses holds here is about the top-bottom and sides of it if you assume people wont change their ways, if you follow the figures as suggested by the climate scientists, if we continue as we are or only slow a little we’re basically stuffed. We need a no-carbon alternative as we have missed the boat with renewables to stop the current problem. Hence nukes are the only real intermediate solution, but they have their own inherent problems. There’s no way we can up renewables use enough to make a dent, whether independant of England or not – the problem is global and most of the globe is further behind renewables than we are. Without some MAJOR renewable leaps AND open season on planning applications for those projects we’re fighting a losing battle. We must invest heavily in renewables ASAP and invest heavily in the safe disposal of nuke waste – nukes not my field so I cant really comment on it very well.
If we could make everything far more efficient, as you say TJ, we’d have a lot fewer problems, but the climate issue would still be there as places like china and india will not tow the line. Unfortunately to make use of woodland and burn biomass you’d be burning about an acre of mature woodland a second for a normal gas powerplant output – not sustainable. Theres one planned in scotland somewhere where they plan to ship wood in from the US?!
porterclough – sorry! I do have an irrational hatred of on-shore windfarms despite thinking that individual wind turbines are beautiful feats of engineering, does that count?