You can never have enough...

[Lilith7]

And if the big power companies had invested in infrastructure over the years in preparation for dry years - instead of taking huge profits for their shareholders, including successive governments of all stripes, we might still be self sufficient in power. If our population hadn't expanded so fast and so much, if we hadn't all taken up technology that relies on power, and demanded the same from our councils, and schools, and institutions. And suppliers.

We are all living beyond our means, but suggest we might downsize, or limit consumption, or live smaller - and all hell breaks loose. Suggest climate change means we need to act now, and take radical action - and more hell breaks loose. And the politicians know it. That's their jobs at risk, their comfy lifestyles, their status and power.

We are spoilt, and we refuse to acknowledge it. And the end result of that refusal is seriously bad news. Not just for belt tightening or any other limitation on our lives - but it puts our grandchildren's lives at serious risk.

That is the real price.

I think that what it comes back to yet again is successive govts  being either unwilling to or incapable of, taking a much longer term view.