(Letter to the South Wales Evening Post)
Gordon Triggs’ assertion that “our children and grandchildren will pay the cost (of green taxes) over the next 50 years” (Have Your Say, Monday 11 June) looks like a good deal when you compare it with the 25 centuries that our children and their descendents are going to have to pay for the storage of nuclear waste.
50 years is about the time it takes to decommission a nuclear power station and make the land safe for use again. It’s probably the time it will take the Gulf of Mexico to recover from the oil spill; or for Nigeria to recover from the damage caused by the oil industry. And the children of the area around Fukushima will be lucky to get their homes back within that time.
Here in Wales many people are still paying the cost of the coal industry decades after the mines closed.
I quite agree with Mr Triggs that our politicians need to be “replaced with independent thinkers who can implement new realistic policies”. But the operative word is “realistic”.
With energy supplies dwindling and demand, and consequently prices, rising, to follow the path of China, India, Brazil and others would be both economic and environmental folly.
Far better to attack our economic and environmental problems by exploiting the free and abundant sources of energy that we have all around us. This will not only give us energy security, but also tens of thousands of clean, safe and sustainable jobs.
Future generations will consider a few “wind farm monstrosities” a small price to pay.
Yours,
Keith M Ross, Swansea Green Party
Swansea Greens - Historic Blog 
Posted by swanseaandllanelligreenparty on June 14, 2012 at 11:47 am
Slightly edited version of my letter appeared in today’s Evening Post.
Posted by Sheila Phelps on June 14, 2012 at 3:38 pm
I have always wondered; if we are to have uncontrolled, mass-immigration as the Greens espouse (senior Green’s such as Caroline Lucas, Ben Duncan and Jason Kitcat are all members of the ‘No Borders’ pro-mass immigration pressure group), then how is the energy going to be generated to deal with the needs of yet more people coming to the UK?
And just how environmentally sound is mass-immigration? More immigrants require more housing, which means more building on the very scarce green-belt land that we have left. I work in Llandarcy, and a whole forest has been raised to make way for the building of 5000 new houses!
Posted by swanseaandllanelligreenparty on June 15, 2012 at 9:06 am
This comment is based on a (perhaps deliberate) misunderstanding of Green Party policy.
Our policy on Migration can be found at: http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/mg.
It begins with: The Green Party’s long-term global vision is of an international economic order where the relationship between regions is non-exploitative, each region is as self-reliant and economically self- sufficient as practicable and the quality of life (social, political, environmental, cultural and economic) is such that there is less urge to migrate.
So our policies would, in the long term, actually reduce migration and, as stated at paragraph MG400, “will not aim to allow increased net migration to Britain”.
I can’t speak for No Borders.