Going green won't alone solve our energy crisis

IF you are going to make something, you need lots of energy. If the price of that energy goes up, you may find a more efficient way of using less of it.

- Neil Collins

Your competitors will, eventually, work out how you did so and will copy you. That is how the market is supposed to work, and you shouldn’t complain. But if your competitor has a permanently lower energy cost than you, he is likely to drive you out of business.

This process can take a long time, but is inexorable. Britain has progressively given up the struggle to compete internationally in large areas of manufacturing. The car plants which turned the UK into a major exporter have mostly shut, or are on death row — the Mini factory outside Oxford will soon find itself making only cars which it will not be allowed to sell in Britain, surely unsustainable in the longer term. The steel industry, which has been a government pensioner for decades, forever on the verge of financial crisis, has only survived at all because of special subsidies for energy.