@ Lew Stewell. Ditto. And couldn't have put it better myself. JM Greer's current series/next book about empire is excellent. Perhaps Dave will give it a pass for absence of overt religious content. Not that Druids are all that religious. Dunno if it affects DoTE's page views but I read DoTE posts on my Kindle via Send To Reader - a delicious irony of terminal complexity.

George. I fear that your pessimism and cynicism are all too justified. The UK's last Government did all it could to bury Tim Jackson's report. The present one cut all funding from the Sustainable Development Commission, which produced it. A major and painful calamity will definitely not be averted if this kind of thinking prevails. Tim Jackson appeared on a BBC business programme about growth last month. Listen to the depth of thinking displayed by "Ferraris for All" author Daniel Ben-Ami and weep. If there is anything encouraging about the programme, it is that it did begin to address the role of energy - unlike a previous programme in the same series which simply dismissed the idea of no growth with incredulity. Mind you, where John Kay of the FT gets the idea that the UK consumes less stuff from, I don't know. Perhaps he is using the trick of ignoring the energy and materials used in China but imported into Britain.

Over here in the UK, today's papers are full of the story that Spain generated 50% of its electricity from wind yesterday. You had to read to the end to find out that Spain's medium term target for sustained wind generation is 13%. Even at 13%, Spain will be light years ahead of the UK on renewables. Like the US, we appear to be in a kind of net energy trap. We're broke. The only thing preventing us sinking deeper into the quicksand is a sky hook of humongous debt, borrowed against growth that will never occur. The more the UK struggles to get off fossil fuel dependency, the more of its meagre ration of future fossil fuel it burns up. Everything Robert Hirsch said about needing decades of advance preparation for Peak Energy is coming true.