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whilst rome burns .....In the BBC series The Blue Planet, David Attenborough's epic documentary on the Earth's oceans first televised seven years ago, he nails us all. That is when Attenborough tells us there is now more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere than at any time "in the last 650,000 years". He rivets our attention even more by saying that we're adding "125 billion tonnes of it every year". This is the global warming George Bush and John Howard kept telling us wasn't happening. This is the multiplying pollution warming our oceans and killing our future. This is the accelerating climate change "we" have to do "something" about. To fix it we have to understand it. Almost none of us do.
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action, not promises .....
Alex Salmond declared Scotland on the brink of a renewables revolution yesterday as he gave the go-ahead for the largest wind farm in Europe.
The First Minister told the World Renewable Energy Congress in Glasgow the green light had been given to a 152-turbine project in South Lanarkshire. The chairman of the congress then hailed Mr Salmond as the "saint of renewable energy".
The announcement for the Clyde wind farm near Abington means Scotland will be home to two of the three largest onshore wind farms in Europe.
The 548-megawatt wind farm, which will be capable of powering 320,000 homes, is bigger even than the Whitlee project near Glasgow, which at 322MW is already the second largest in Europe. The largest operational wind farm in Europe is at Guadalajara in Spain.
It means more than 4.5 gigawatts of renewable energy has been approved in Scotland, putting it just 400MW away from meeting its targets of generating 31 per cent of its electricity demand from renewable sources by 2011.
Mr Salmond told the congress: "The initial target of 31 per cent will be exceeded long before 2011, and by 2011 we will be through that target by a very, very substantial margin."
He was confident of meeting the target of producing 50 per cent of energy from renewables by 2020. He told The Scotsman: "I am even more confident about that than about the 2011 target.
By 2020, we will be able to mobilise some of our gigantic stuff offshore."
He predicted that, in the future, it will be offshore energy, such as wind, wave and tidal power, that will hold the most potential for Scotland.
By about 2050, he forecast that offshore renewables would be able to generate 60GW of power – ten times the amount consumed in Scotland each year.
Wind farms: Now We've Got The Biggest In Europe