Letter: Renewable power is a benefit for all time

What would we rather live next to, an electricity pylon needed for wind farms to harvest the energy in the air or a gas rig needed to exploit carbon fuels buried under our feet?

The balance sheet is easy, renewable energy is here forever, whereas fossil fuels are a short-term fix.

We can use unlimited amounts of renewable energy without damaging the planet but as the International Panel for Climate Change told us last weekend we can't even burn the conventional gas and oil reserves we already know about without casing catastrophic climate change.

This winter we got just a little taste of what that would mean for the UK, elsewhere higher temperatures will force millions of subsistence farmers into starvation.

I grew up near a nuclear power plant, it was in an isolated part of the countryside, and funnily enough I heard no protests about the miles of pylons needed to connect these plants to the national grid.

The Coalition Government seems equally happy to spend billions on the environmental devastation of a single high speed track to save a few minutes.

Here in Oswestry the Market Hall heating system needs replacing, which is it to be I wonder, another gas-guzzling heater or a bio-mass boiler?

Councillor Duncan Kerr, Oswestry