“Leaked documents seen by the Guardian show that Gordon Brown will be advised today that the target Tony Blair signed up to this year for 20% of all European energy to come from renewable sources by 2020 is expensive and faces ’severe practical difficulties’,” reads a story headlined Labour’s plan to abandon renewable energy targets in today’s Guardian.

“Mr [John] Hutton [secretary of state for business] will tell Mr Brown that there are severe practical difficulties about meeting the 20% target. These include persuading the Ministry of Defence and the shipping industry to accept more offshore wind power, as well as increased research and development costs for marine and tidal power.”

Don’t listen to him, Gordon! The little I have read about climate change mitigation recently suggests that the share of renewable energy will have to be dramatically increased. Of course there will be “severe practical difficulties” in transforming energy policy. The point is, we should all be convinced by now that the difficulties are necessary – that was Al Gore’s inconvenient truth.

The supposed opponents from the MoD and elsewhere are only one of the obstacles to the renewables target cited in the Guardian story. But they caught my attention. Who are these recalcitrant people who apparently hold such power? Under what forces do ordinary people become, for example,  the very worst climate change deniers or corporate culprits? I bet they drew pretty pictures of polar bears when they were children, and no doubt would have argued vociferously and instinctively that the planet should be saved if you had asked them their opinion. I am probably not in the right position to speculate on what has happened to them in the intervening years. But I think I am safe in making a general comment that sometimes adults seem to take on their employer’s causes as their own (no matter what that cause is) in a way that would be unthinkable to a self-reliant, self-satisfying child.

In other news, it was right frosty this morning: