Writing in The Business today, I made the point that people are generally far more scared of terrorism than climate change and rightly so.

Even if you believe the worst case scenarios, most people would be relatively untouched by climate change, warming the atmosphere a few degrees or 6 by 2100. And if you're a technological optimist like me and have read "The Singularlity is Near" by Ray Kurzweil, there really will be almost no problems that we can't solve by that date, if not decades before. The risk though of a weapon of mass destruction in the hands of at least a few terrorists seems to move ever closer.

The far better argument to make for alternative energy is based on drying up the fee supply of capital to oil rich nations in the Middle East who then use it to fund Madrassahs, terrorism, undermine Liberal Democracy abroad and keep their people repressed at home. Whatever you may think of the Iraq War, the irony is that because it has inadvertently added a good 15 to 20 dollars to the price of a barrel of oil, the indirect consequence has been to partly-fuel an alternative energy investment boom.