Mr Boulton made some interesting comments in reply to my earlier letter about the kids’ climate strike.

He said wind energy gets more subsidy than fossil fuels and nuclear. In fact, the most recent available figures show that in 2016 the government provided £10.5bn in support for fossil fuels and £7.3bn for renewables. And should Hinkley be completed, its subsidies over 35 years will dwarf those for renewables.

Mr Boulton raised the old chestnut about the intermittency of renewables. Is he not aware of the current 8 GW pipeline of battery storage projects in the UK? These will store excess renewable energy for use at those times when little renewable energy is being generated.

Mr Boulton hoped nuclear fission will one day provide the solution. It’s been promised for decades. We can’t take that risk – and we don’t need to. In the last 5 years the world-wide costs of renewable and energy storage technologies have fallen at a speed very few predicted. As a result, fossil fuels are no longer the backbone of our energy system. In the first quarter of 2019 they accounted for only 43 per cent of total UK power generation - see tinyurl.com/y4qssnu6. As renewables take up an ever-larger share of generation, fossil fuels become ever-more unprofitable, and world-wide investment in them is drying up.

I’m surprised Mr Boulton seems unaware of all this. I’d recommend he reads “The Switch” by Chris Goodall. Or watches a Tony Seba TED talk about technology cost curves. Or visits energy-storage.news.

The climate solutions are here, now. The tragedy is that we’re still not grabbing them with both hands. Young people have every right to push us hard to ditch the dinosaur technologies. It’s their future at stake.

Andy O’Brien

Thornbury