Climate Revolution supports Trillion Fund

In view of the IPCC mitigation report, I have pulled out this entry on Trillion Fund from my Diary (Friday, 28 March). Just read it first:

Trillion Fund came to see us, Michael Stein and Julia Groves. They’re doing very well. Their aim is to open up banking to small investors and at the same time make it possible for people to invest in renewable energy: in effect, energy projects can be crowd-funded.

Julia has been talking to government ministers (lobbying) They have now agreed! – Small investors will not be restricted, anyone can fund projects. Also we are going to get Green ISA’s.

Michael seems to know more about energy and energy extraction than anyone. Ask him a question e.g. about the Severn Barrage scheme and his face lights up: it’s not necessary, disused Welsh harbours are better places to do this. Michael has simple solutions.

One idea could be to work with France and the EU to lease desert in Algeria and Morocco, or Greece who needs the money and build solar parks he explains, we can use the same pipe-line which brings nuclear energy from France to bring us solar.

Indeed Trillion Fund could supply a plan for us to have energy security, as clean as possible and which becomes very cheap once the investment is paid back.

No need to Frack: Climate Revolution talks only sense for the environment and sense for the economy.

The IPCC report tells us that it is not too late to limit warming to less than 2°C  if we start now; also the longer we wait, the harder it gets to transfer to renewable energy.

The whole tone of the report is that the transfer will happen because it’s got to. Will it happen in time? That’s what we have to deal with.

Now I understand why Julia Groves had a success in lobbying for green ISA’s. It’s got to happen. Why not let small investors from the general public help pay for it?

But how crazy that our government is pushing for fracking in light of the distraction and waste of time it causes when we should be working on renewables. (Of course we all know that fossil fuels contribute 78% to warming.)

And what about all this old stuff about national energy security? (Our government and most of the world is trapped in war mentality. Co-operation between countries, not competition, exploitation and war should be the new mentality.)

Trillion is thinking of global co-operation when it moots the idea of solar parks in North Africa. The IPCC report is clear that we have to have global co-operation.

I think that fracking won’t happen in the UK because it is such a mad idea for our densely populated country – it will destroy it. (Conservative, ha!) Nevertheless we have to fight it, starting with exploratory drilling. We have to fight it to get it into our government’s head that they can’t discount public opinion. It must be a battle we are seen to win. We must begin fighting the battle against warming now.