Well said Infidel.
Also, does anyone at The Scotsman ask who funds Prof. McKelvey's salary and grant money? Or does his college get funding from self-interested groups?
I think every report like this should come with that information as standard so we know who is pulling the strings.

Time to neuter men and women after one child I think.

Can we have nominations on the floor, please.

I suggest Ellen deGeneres. And Dale Winton!

The circles the eco-nuts find themselves running in. Bio-fuels are pushing up world grain prices. They also don't save CO2 since to make them requires fertilizer & to make fertilizer requires rather more fuel energy than is produced. Finally bio-fuels are so expensive that nobody would go for them if it weren't for subsidies.

So we see anti-GM Luddites calling for more GM & government aid for the poor who will go hungry because of government subsidy to a useless industry that wouldn't exist otherwise.

Meanwhile real environmentalists want cheap, CO2 free, small scale nuclear.

This was always going to blow up in our faces, can't the green lentil munchers wake up and just accept nuclear? How can you expect a farmer to watch his food crop go off to be turned into bio diesel while his family starves? And I bet a way will be found to use GM crops that are not fit for humans to eat just so that he can't cream off a little for himself.

The population argument is also a poor one folks, it's all very well to try to restrict population in areas like the UK, but the people who SHOULD breed - ie the ones who work hard and put back into society - are the ones who will be concientious and not breed, leaving the great unwashed breeding with impunity and then expecting the rest of us to look after them!

Biofuels increase rather than decrease global warming. There has been a massive increase in forest clearance in Indonesia to make land available to grow more corn. All this is encouraged by Gormless Gordon's tax incentives on biofuel announced in the budget.

Neil, believe it or not many greenies have neve rbeen in favour of biofuels.
The fact that the biggest pushers of bioethanol in the USA have been massive agri-industrial combines should tell you something, i.e. that its a boondoggle of the highest order.
Plus, the research to demonstrate all this has built up over the past few years, meaning that people suggesting it ten years ago were not in possession of all the facts that we are now, and what these facts say is that bioethanol is only a small stop-gap measure.
I am glad to note that you are now showing awareness of the energy intensity of the modern farming industry.

Dragonhead, given Chinas increased car use, it is entirely likely that rich people will buy it to fuel their cars, leaving poor people to starve. Of course if too many people started starving the Chinese gvt would have a problem.

McMicrogal- hey, in developing countries poor people starve whilst food produced in their country gets shipped abroad to rich foreigners. Bit like the Irish famine.

There are 2 proven methods of reducing birth rate: Government dictatorship (i.e China's 'One Child Policy' - needs a strong centralised government to work) and increasing the wealth and power of poor women. This second route has been followed by rich countries everywhere and is more democratic (hope you agree with me on that one!).

There are people looking into biofuels round here, but they are thinking in terms of what can be produced within the area, for example oil from chip shops, not of destroying pristine rainforest, selling off the valuable timber and planting oil palms in degraded and unprotected soil. So as Guthrie says, it's not greens who ever suggested this short-sighted destruction.

What to do? Grow food with less energy input (urban agriculture and permaculture) and move away from liquid fuels for transport e.g. go to plug-in hybrids and more public transport. Even in the USA, with its rugged, outdoors, macho, blah blah image, 70% of commutes to work are less than 20 miles. In other words, the main use for most people for all these fuel-munching SUVs etc is sitting in a traffic jam for 40 minutes twice a day (you know that's the truth - off-road yeah right).

Neil,

I'm a "real" environmentalist, and I oppose nuclear power for the following reasons:

It creates long lived, very dangerous waste;
It is not carbon free (as you claim)
It is very expensive

The final point is probably the most important. If we want to avoid the worst effects of climate change, we need to find the most cost effective way of doing so. And if you rank the various ways of mitigating against CC in decreasing order of cost effectiveness, you find that nuclear power (while appearing to be quite appealing at first glance) is really quite a long way down the list.

And as Guthrie points out, the explosion in the use of biofuels isn't being pushed by environmentalists. Palm oil plantations in South East Asia are responsible for the destruction of immense tracts of rainforest; go to http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/ for more details.

Population growth is a problem. The earth is way beyond its natural carrying capacity, which has been artificially inflated by the production of cheap energy sources (which are now beginning to peak globally). But while it is a major challenge, it doesn't let the rest of us off the hook. We've all got to do what we can to live sustainably. I'm sure that's something we can all agree on - right, Neil?

PS Calling people "eco nuts" doesn't help your argument and just makes you look a bit silly.

Flint
1) Current reactor waste is down to safe levels in 50 years & less radioactive than the ground it was mined from in a few hundred.
2) It is as close to carbon free as anything is. Certainly far moreso than windmills.
3) At 1.3p a unit it is half the price of conventional power & 1/4 onshore wind.

I hope that you are open minded & willing to base your opinions on facts because in that case you are now a nuclear supporter.

Guthrie, whilethere may be some differnce between individuals the idea that the eco movement is in any way not in favour of biofuels loses some credibility if you note the failure of any of them to say so. Equally we see eco movements sometimes seeking some local support by opposing a particular windfarm but that does not convince anybody that it wasn't their hobbyhorse in the first place.

Captain Flint, you're right on the money about carrying capacity, Peak Oil and the dangers of biofuels. I'm still agnostic on nuclear power - when you compare it to hydro, wind and tidal it's well down the list. However, when the probability of coal rears its ugly head the equation changes for many of us.

Humanity will not solve the carrying capacity problem, I'm afraid. Declining birth rates will not lower our population in time (I think we have only a generation or two to get things back in balance), so the only thing that will do it is raising the death rate. Getting us to a sustainable population of 1 billion by 2082 (in 75 years) at our current birth rate will require somewhere around 100 million excess deaths per year. This is ten times the death toll of WWII, and is beyond the ability of most people to accept, so we will have to wait for Mother Nature to do the job.

In the meantime, we can all help her along by using as much biofuel as we can grow...

IN Al Gore's borefest of a movie, he simply ignored the nearly vertical increase in population and concentrated on the snail-like increase of "warming".
Too difficult to confront. As #13 says, we need a Malthusian event.