Government’s latest decision to invest €130 million in near-shore wind farms at the Sikka l-Bajda reef goes to show how arbitrary and unprepared politicians can be, as they try to reach predetermined targets that are anything but realistic.
In making the announcement last weekend, Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi effectively threw two years of obstinacy down the drain, after he had previously vetoed land-based and near-shore wind turbines in favour of non-existent technology in deep water wind farms, against expert advice.
Even now, the government’s workings remain obscure. According to the government’s draft policy on renewable energy – which was published two years ago, and which had ruled out wind farms at Sikka l-Bajda – the site can produce 2.1% of Malta’s energy needs. Now, the prime minister is saying that a wind farm there can produce 4%. How, exactly, the figure has doubled in two years is a mystery which Gonzi has yet to explain.
What is particularly striking, however, is the piecemeal approach towards the crucial alternative energy question that makes a veritable mockery of the administration’s alleged environmental credentials.
The truth is that government is simply trying to stick to a catchy, marketable slogan set by the European Union – by far unrealistic on all counts, as witnessed by reputable science experts – to reach a 20% target of alternative energy by 2020.
That, in itself, is already dismissed as pie in the sky. As Professor Sir David King – chief science advisor to Tony Blair – has recently said, such a target is unrealistically optimistic and it is unlikely that levels of greenhouse gases can be kept low enough to avoid a projected temperature rise of 2°C.
A scary scenario indeed, as current scientific knowledge suggests that above 2°C, billions of people will face water shortages, and the world’s food supplies could be threatened amid widespread extinction.
Prof. King’s suggestion is also echoed on the home front in an interview we are carrying today with energy security expert Robert Ebel (page 8), who says in no uncertain terms that Malta’s target of generating 10% of its energy from alternative sources by 2020 as overtly unrealistic.
It is up to the governments to take the lead and bring about a real change in people’s lifestyles, before we reach the point of no return. Sadly, the increase in water and electricity tariffs is exclusively fuelled by fiscal considerations, providing no alternatives and promising nothing in return. The proposed wind farms in themselves will contribute little or nothing to the electricity grid, and even then, there is no backup planned from other energy sources to make sure that the distribution would be steady, irrespective of weather conditions.
Meanwhile energy conservation measures in buildings remain totally unenforced, as Malta witnesses more and more construction that ignores ecological considerations despite the obvious needs of the immediate future.
If mainstream science is right, in 50 years’ time we may need to take all our carbon out of the way we live – which would be by all means an extraordinary technological and social revolution.
It is this scenario which demands radical measures. It means we will have to spend more to adapt, besides to cut emissions, and we will have to change many of the daily habits we have come to take for granted. It is not a message that the political class likes to project, but politicians’ empty messages have contributed next to nothing to stop, let alone reverse, our looming global catastrophe.
Setting unrealistic targets with round dates and figures solves nothing of the impending disaster we are heading towards. Only credible and firm leadership, with a holistic vision backed by adequate scientific research, can somehow set the ball rolling on climate change and alternative energy.

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