Where's it? Who's got it?
I consider that nuclear energy is expensive, dangerous and evil, and most of all, absolutely unnecessary. But Dr Woodstock will be saying more about that.
Thank you, Jennifer. Now I'm very pleased to welcome Dr Catherine Woodstock. She is the author of several books on alternative technology.
Hello, I'd like to begin by agreeing with Jennifer. We can develop alternative sources of power and unlesswe try, we'll never succeed.
Instead of burning fossil fuels, we should be concentrating on more economic uses of electricity, because electricity can be produced from any source of energy.
If we didn't waste so much energy, our resources would last longer. You can save more energy by conservation than you can produce for the same money.
Unless we do research on solar energy, wind power, wave power, tidal power, hydroelectric schemes etc, ourfossil fuels will run out, and we'll all freeze or starve to death.
Other countries are spending much more than us on research, and don't forget that energy from the sun, thewaves, the wind lasts for ever.
We really won't survive unless we start working on cleaner, safer sources of energy.
Thank you very much, Dr Woodstock. Our final speaker, before we open the discussion to the studio audience, is Charles Wicks, MP, the Minister of Energy.
I've been listening to the other speaker's with great interest. By the way, I don't agree with some of theestimates of world energy reserves. More oil and gas is being discovered all the time.
If we listened to the pessimists, and there are a lot of them about, none of us would sleep at night.
In the short term, we must continue to rely on the fossil fuels, oil, coal and gas.
But we must also look at the future. Our policy must be flexible. Unless we thought new research was necessary, we wouldn't be spending money on it.
After all, the government wouldn't have a department of energy unless they thought it was important.
The big question is where to spend the money, on conservation of present resources or on research into newforms of power.
But I'm fairly optimistic. I wouldn't be in this job unless I were an optimist.