The questions that will shape our future global society must be answered locally first, writes TONY KINSELLA
In October 1829, George and Robert Stephenson won the Liverpool and Manchester railway competition with their Rocket locomotive and launched the railway age. A century later railways had spanned our entire planet - a physical phenomenon quite unlike anything our species had ever seen.
It transformed industry, trade, agriculture, warfare, and indeed humanity along the way. The historian AJP Taylor observed that the first World War was "an unexpected climax to the railway age". One unfortunate, and at the time unknown, byproduct was the explosion of CO2 emissions from 1850 onwards as revealed in Antarctic and Greenland ice cores.
Such fundamental, if anarchic, transformations can also be triggered by the development and enunciation of new ideas and approaches.
David Bower coined the Think Globally, Act Locally imperative when he founded Friends of the Earth in 1969. There was a generational, even a Californian, element to this motto. It was an exhortation to not just think and talk about change, but to begin implementing it in our own lives and immediate communities. Its strength lay in the solid interweaving of the local and the global strands.
Over the intervening 40 years this interweave has started to fray, particularly among campaigning groups where an often self-defeating tendency to focus exclusively on the local aspect can be identified.
The local and the autonomous are seen as inherently attractive, while the global and the institutional are not only viewed with what could be healthy suspicion, they are almost instinctively rejected.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in responses to the twin challenges of energy policy and global climate change.
There is now an extraordinary, and growing, global consensus that emitting greenhouse gases such as CO2 contributes to an alarming and accelerating rate of planetary climate change.
The recent collapse of more than 400sq km of the Antarctic's Wilkins Ice Shelf serves to emphasise the scale of the challenges we face, and the limited time frame available to us.
In October 2006, Lord Stern, economic adviser to the British government, made a sound business argument for tackling climate change. Earlier this month, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant church in the US, reversed its stance, saying it was now " . . . persuaded that these issues are among the current era's challenges that require a unified moral voice".
This consensus leads directly to a common understanding of the need to quickly move away from our dependence on fossil fuels, oil, coal and gas, and to replace them with energy sources that are at least carbon-neutral.
The ESB's announced €22 billion investment plan, including 1,400 megawatts of wind generation capacity, addresses this reality. Wind capacity will be backed by (CO2 emitting) gas turbine plants. When the wind blows, it will provide a bit less than 25 per cent of our electricity needs. This is similar to the current Danish reality where about 18 per cent of that country's electricity is wind generated, with the balance (54 per cent) coming from coal-burning stations, supported by major electricity trading with its neighbours.
Some €17.5 billion of the ESB's investment will go to networks and smart metering systems. These will facilitate the integration of surplus home-generated renewable electricity into the national grid.
Will many of those welcoming smart metering and wind generation investment be among the objectors to new transmission lines, gas turbine generators, and international inter-connectors?
The ESB talks of new clean-burn coal plants, although this technology is not likely to be available before 2020 and the German parliament's TAB research service estimates that such plants will use about 20 per cent of the energy they produce to clean and store their own emissions.
How might we then generate the additional electricity to electrify our railways, or replace buses with light rail systems in our major towns and cities?
ESB chief executive Pádraig McManus does not see nuclear power as "being an issue" in Ireland before 2035. The backbone of Europe's new generating systems over the next 30 years will have to be coal and/or nuclear fission. Given the planning and construction lead times, decisions will have to be made in the next few years.
Would a local versus global focus accept new British nuclear plants supplying much of our island's electricity? Is international nuclear research co-operation acceptable? Yes, if the €10 billion global ITER gamble on nuclear fusion produces clean power, but no if it addresses improving the safety of fission reactors?
Energy and climate questions will shape our global society over the coming decades. New economic giants such as China and India understandably reject any attempt to prohibit them developing their economies as the developed world did - through burning staggering quantities of coal - unless they are offered cost-effective alternatives.
Dispatching one's army to occupy oil fields, when a lone guerrilla with a $200 rocket propelled grenade can wreck a pipeline for weeks, is regularly revealed to be a pointless exercise in Iraq.
Nicolas Sarkozy's recent effusive visit to London was partly motivated by France's need for a significant nuclear generating partner. Berlin is trapped between its political commitment to close its nuclear plants and its dependence on high-emission lignite power stations. As an energy partnership is not on offer within the established Franco-German axis, Paris went looking elsewhere.
We are going to alter our planet, for better or worse, over the next quarter of a century at least as much as railways did 1829-1929.
There are no absolute, and few clear, answers to many of the political and societal choices we must collectively take. Yet choose we must, clearly and quickly.
In 1829 the Stephensons enjoyed the luxury of ignorance.
We don't."We are going to alter our planet as much as railways did 1829-1929