SO MUCH for Labour's fearsome media machine. On the morning of July 15th Ed Miliband, the secretary of state for energy and climate change, was giving press interviews in London trumpeting his government's plans to cut Britain's greenhouse-gas emissions and rebuild its economy around clean energy. The very next day the Vestas wind-turbine plant on the Isle of Wight, the biggest in Britain, completed its final batch of turbine blades and shut up shop, with the loss of over 600 jobs.

The fact that this blade shop's inferior blades caused no end of warranty costs for Vestas seems to have escaped the Economist's normally top shelf auditors. I won't go into the details, suffice to say that one of Vestas' turbine models which they acquired by buying Micon is now being phased out. hence, inferior factory closes.  Would that England realized that onshore windpower is task no. 1 could have changed the situation.

Mr Miliband had the guts to admit that building nuclear reactors and wind turbines would mean energy bills rising, an unpopular consequence that other politicians have avoided mentioning. Officials guess that Britain will have to spend £324 billion-404 billion ($532 billion-663 billion) by 2050 to scrub out carbon.

I haven't been able yet to identify who or what "officials" make the estimate, but i have been able to identify that Thee Economyst's normally excellent auditors have once again neglected to mention the entire range of externalites not accounted for in the UK system. Despite these externalities being what's known as "hard costs."

and then Thee Eek onomist turns about face and says the support isn't enough.

Yet the money looks inadequate to the ambition. The biggest new dollop of cash is £405m for developing eco-industries, including £120m for offshore wind turbines, £60m for wave and tidal energy, and £15m for nuclear research. That pales next to the hundreds of billions the government mustered to bail out the finance industry it now hopes to trim. Gordon Edge, chief economist at the British Wind Energy Association, argues that raw financial firepower is less important than directing it wisely, but he concedes that Britain's government has been less pushy than some. In fact, say analysts at HSBC, a bank, its Keynesian splurge is one of the world's least green. Britain has allocated 7% of total spending to environmental causes, compared with 12% in America and 83% in South Korea.

I can assure you, i'm not schizophrenic, and neither am i. Both of us are wondering however, how every nation, country, city-state, principality, city and village is going to be No.1 in renewables, as they are all claiming.

Wouldn't it be simpler to just get on with the work of building renewables into a transparent part of our civilization?

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin