The salary for this position has been set at between £25,000 and £28,000 per year.

Add onto this an 'essential car allowance'; a generous, if ironic, car mileage allowance; employer contributions to the incumbent's pension; national insurance and private health benefits and the final cost will likely come in at around £35,000 per annum.

Having recently changed all of my present light bulbs with 18 watt (100 watt equivalent) low energy light bulbs, it occurs to me that the cost of this latest non-job would be enough to purchase 17,500 such light bulbs each and every year for the foreseeable future and distribute them freely to the hard pressed council tax paying and non-council tax paying people of this town.

This would not only make a measurable contribution towards reducing carbon emissions but would also help minimise the soaring energy costs from which they are currently suffering.

Instead, we will get yet another bureaucrat who may spend months producing a glossy pamphlet to be distributed to all households advising us not to leave our videos and televisions in stand-by mode and yes – to swap our light bulbs for their low-energy equivalents.

Beam me up, Scotty – it's a madhouse down here!
Steve Latimer
Navigation Point
Hartlepool


CLIMATE change is causing the Arctic ice to melt and it is becoming much easier to tap into the vast oil and gas reserves that have previously been difficult to gain access to.

There could be more oil there than the combined reserves of Nigeria, Mexico and Kazakhstan, and Arctic's gas reserves amount to 27 per cent of all the gas in the world.

Greenpeace and others are certain that climate change is happening because oil, gas and coal are being burned all over the world.

If the burning of fossil fuels causes the ice to melt, which is what they say, then they believe it is unfortunate that more oil and gas can now be extracted and burned which in turn, as the Greens see it, will cause even more ice to melt causing the sea-levels to rise followed by flooding problems in low-lying areas of the world.

The Greens say that all that is necessary to avoid disaster is for all the countries of the world to switch to wind, wave, solar power and energy conservation and mankind's energy problems will be over.

Their views are clearly not accepted because the USA, Russia, Canada and Greenland are all planning to drill for oil and gas in the Arctic.

It would seem that the Greenpeace solution to the world's energy problems is considered by many to be an impossible dream.

The world's energy future is shaping up to be nuclear, coal, gas and oil. With some renewables where economically feasible.
Jim Allan
Hartlepool