FUEL POVERTY FOR ALL JUST ROUND THE CORNER.

What are we going to do when the fuel runs out?

Goodstein, author of the book "Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil" stated "The oil will run out, the only question is exactly when," but continues, "Civilization as we know it will come to an end sometime this century, when the fuel runs out". So we probably have a lot less than 90 years.

When do we panic then?

According to Stanford University geophysicist Amos Nur. "The point of panic has already taken place. There is a huge conflict that might already be emerging"

So what exactly are we going to do?

The UK government is contemplating the building a wind farms, that's really going to help. To power 25 million homes you'll need 7,000 working turbines, that's one for every half a mile of coastline and we're not talking about powering our industry and transport. The Vice President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Dr Sue Ion, said that wind power could only provide about 20% of the country's electricity to preserve grid stability.

"Laudable though the targets are, we urge government to think about the practicalities of deploying these technologies; the engineering effort to build 7,000 large offshore turbines by 2020 would be enormous, unprecedented and is probably underestimated," she said.

To achieve the governments target it has to build 14 turbines a week for the next ten years and they're still just talking about it.

No one has explained what they are going to do when there's no wind!

OK, so we'll go nuclear.

Building one new nuclear power station takes decades and one will not be enough and anyway from where are we going to get the Uranium to make it work. Uranium is not exactly going to be readily available or cheap once the oil starts to run out. Oh! by the way, Russia is the largest exporter of Uranium followed possibly by Australia and the USA. To top it all there's only about enough for the next 100 years anyway, it's not exactly a common element.

So what are we really going to do?

Nothing, as usual, Goodstein says "Governments do not have the political will to prepare for the end of oil."

When has our government planned for the future? We are World leaders in wind turbine technology but are we seriously using it? No! As a result of the credit crunch President Obama has announced a huge investment in alternative energy sources in the US so we won't be the world leaders for much longer. But don't I remember we were once World leaders in nuclear energy too!

It's amazing how the Bank of England can find £75,000,000,000 for just one of their efforts to pump up the economy, but why don't they spend it on something actually useful?