Energy

Tom Griffin (London, The Green Ribbon):Alex Salmond's opponents have long claimed that he would look to stir up trouble with Westminster at every opportunity.
His perfomance as First Minister has defied those predictions to some extent, but this week, he picked what looks like a carefully chosen fight:

Tony Curzon Price (London, openDemocracy): I entirely support Stuart Weir's view that a decision as momentous as restarting nuclear build should be arrived at by something like a Royal Commission. The question is too large, delicate and long term for ordinary representative institutions to deliver legitimacy.

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): I am intuitively, perhaps ideologically, against nuclear power. I sat in on the deliberations of the Nuclear Consultation Working Group that has just issued a damning report on the government's plans to sanction a new generation of nuclear power stations (see nuclearconsult.com) with two purposes: to study in depth the issues involved and to gain an expert's eye view on the consultation exercise that the courts had demanded from government. I am now clear that my fears that the decision to go nuclear is reckless, dangerous and wasteful are justified; and equally that the consultation exercise was deeply flawed and failed to engage with the real risks and challenges that going nuclear entails.

Rupert Read (Norwich, The Green Party): So the Cabinet has (yesterday) spinelessly given the unanimous go-ahead for our kingdom to ‘go nuclear' once again. The formal Parliamentary announcement that New Labour is taking the nuclear option will come tomorrow, but we have known for a few years now that this was a fait accompli, and that the consultation(s) would be and were a sham. It has been coming because nuclear power is seen as an easy, ‘low-carbon' option for energy, at a time when the government is desperately trying to present itself as serious about manmade climate change.

Moderator: Cross posted from oD Today.

Tony Curzon Price (London, openDemocracy): Evan Davis, the telegenic and usually excellent BBC Economics corespondent, had a heart-stoppingly bad argument this morning on the Today show. Darling is hauling in the gas and power companies to hear justifications of the 60% price increases we've seen this year. Evan Davis went through A-level oligopoly theory, explaining that "prices are sticky ... energy firms won't reduce prices because they know that others will follow them if they do, so doing no good but hurting profits ... and that our energy suppliers know that we don't easily switch anyway." So much, so (half) true.