Environmental campaigners at the University of East Anglia have criticised the Government's 2006 energy policy consultation document Our Energy Challenge.

 

In its official response sent to ministers next week, the UEA-based Community Carbon Reduction Programme (CRed) argues that the only way to make significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions is by embarking on a major drive to cut waste, reduce demand and increase focus on innovation and renewable energy.

 

A resource efficient economy based on distributed and local power generation would be far cheaper than building new generating capacity, particularly nuclear power. It would also be more secure and resilient to fossil fuel price and supply shocks.

 

The image is a resonant one and rests indelibly in the mind. The plant sits, fuming restlessly, while all around an inept Soviet bureaucracy crumbles into the ensuing chaos. No one knows how many will have died as a result of the radioactive cloud expelled by Chernobyl's number 4 reactor on 26 April 1986; the fact that people are still debating it says enough.

 

Skip forward 20 years, and nuclear power is edging back into vogue. It wasn't just Chernobyl that drove it out of favour, of course: the Three Mile Island incident in Pennsylvania in 1979, a catalogue of economic and technical setbacks in several nations, and the surprising resilience of fossil fuels as a cheap and available source of energy had already seen to that.

A detailed and disturbing strategy document has revealed an extraordinary American plan to destroy Europe's support for the Kyoto treaty on climate change.

 

The ambitious, behind-the-scenes plan was passed to The Independent this    week, just as 189 countries are painfully trying to agree the second stage    of Kyoto at the UN climate conference in Montreal. It was pitched to    companies such as Ford Europe, Lufthansa and the German utility giant RWE.