Paul Kingsnorth ("A conspiracy too far?", 15 September) makes a valiant attempt to rehabilitate Michael Meacher as a friend of green causes, and it must have been tempting for those who read his j'accuse in the Guardian on the anniversary of the twin towers attack to credit it with insight: there is no champion as tempting as a dumped minister with a grievance against an unpopular boss.
But Meacher has previous. Early in office, he filled another page of the Guardian with the most exotic bright-green tripe about solving power-greedy Europe's energy deficit by filling the deserts of Libya with solar cells and pumping the resulting power under the Mediterranean via a giant cable. At the time, I imagined that his civil servants had fed him the story for an internal sweepstake on his credulousness. Like Clive Sinclair with his C5 electric go-kart, Meacher managed to scupper a valid need by an inept presentation of its solution. Solar cells produce variable DC voltage at low currents: it doesn't travel, let alone convert to grid-quality AC. I once saw a wind generator on a hilltop near Exeter whose cranky owner had abandoned it because the 200 volts DC it produced from good wind flows were largely dissipated as heat in the buried cable, through the effort of conveying it across a three-acre field to the farmhouse.
Local power is very local, and Saharan Africa might prefer to solve its own energy issues before leasing real estate for giant vanity projects.
Tony Clarke
Witcham, Cambridgeshire
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