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Energy White Paper

I understand perfectly what my hon. Friend is saying. I think that I am right in saying that a good deal of work has been done in his local council area on biomass. A lot has been done in the past 18 months. Apart from anything else, we have almost doubled the amount of energy that we get from wind farms in just over that period, which is important. There have also been developments in the European Union emissions trading scheme. My hon. Friend is quite right to say that we will depend on coal; we do so very substantially at the moment. Two things are necessary to get cleaner coal—although that is a comparative term in relation to carbon emissions—and to move to carbon capture and storage. I should have dealt with this point earlier, because it was raised by the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Susan Kramer). It is true to say that the technology to capture, transport and store the carbon exists, but it has not actually been joined up on a commercial basis yet. That is why I am so reluctant to say, ““Let’s abandon nuclear now.”” These things might never become available. I have said on many occasions that we should not put all our eggs in one basket. It makes sense to have a sensible mix, and it would make no sense at all to put these decisions off in the hope that they will not come back to bite us one day.