i don't feel that our leaders are really holding the public interest in mind with this move to gas, the 'kindler, gentler' fossil fuel.

it leads to our continued dependence on russia for decades, which may encourage them not to be militaristic in their old desire to own part of the med, but hemorrhages  way too much labour capital up north, for a fix that's temporary.

our glorious middlemen are making out like bandits, and unless we get really creative with biogas (a Great idea, btw), we'll have high costs transporting the stock for digestion/gasification to huge centralised plants, unless they're situated next to millions of acres of farmland, pumping out hemp/sunflowers/rape whatever.

far better to have hundreds of smaller ones, tied into local grids, and neighbourhood cooking/heating gas delivery.

it works in asia on a small farm/household level, should be scaled but nothing like the size they are now. it goes with initiatives to create a social population spread that encourages networks of many bustling 'market towns' rather than megalopoli and depopulated countryside duality, the current trend.

medium-sized is beautiful. respects and nurtures roots in region, rather than creating young people wistfully gazing at the Biggest Babylon on the Block, where  people have real lives instead of hanging out at the burger stand kicking cans out of boredom with their too-little universes out in boonyville.

the last millenium we created cities because of trade routes, wealth storage centres, cultural as well as material.

now we have wind and PV we can economically empower places with less obvious resources by having them produce electricity and selling it to the grid, (paid in chris' energy units, natch), and that can provide funds to boost attractive reasons for kids to stay where they are more and appreciate their luck.

this would do much for the social fabric so damaged by atomisation and the 'mobile' society, and enhance family solidarity. with today's communication media we can stay abreast of the world even remotely, and the young will feel less disenchanted with the few options there are now for youth employment in the sticks, where machinery has relieved people of the need to spend so much time in the fields, and the least valued chores have been taken over to a large degree by immigrant labour.

this leads to a lot of drug use in under-challenged, under-inspired. under-employed young people, and that also opens them up to hard right rhetoric and other testosteroney aberrations.

and the immigrants often don't make enough to really join the host society, especially after sending home money to their relatives back home.

so now we have chem farming killing wildlife, poisoning aquifers, rivers and streams, toxifying the topsoil, and workers and grants from the EU to keep growing tobacco in our local best valleybottom land, and buying green beans from israel or chile...

it's a sophisticated puzzle, and right now it seems put together all upside-in.

/rant

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty