.
The successive hurricanes that have hammered the entire cluster of seaborne nations in and around the Gulf of Mexico, in some cases devastating island-economies, should prove a lesson to countries that having pro-active policies in place, as opposed to just being reactive in case of disasters, saves money and lives.
The 2011 Mari blast should have to some extent served as a wake-up call that Cyprus, as an island, needs to have alternative sources of energy and better utilise ‘green systems’. The government declared a while back that “several thousand” green jobs would be created with the introduction of clean energy, but nothing has materialised, simply because incentives were not in place and politicians just wanted to pamper their voters.
The delay in exploration and output of natural gas from the Cyprus seabed should not have been used as a pretext to push back plans to introduce LNG and LPG in power stations and even cars. That resource is now hesitantly coming on stream, but only because Cyprus faces harsher emission fines if it does not introduce natgas any time soon.
Solar power should have been the dominant source of energy, but there again, the state ran out of cash and could no longer afford subsidies for new solar parks. Instead we have wind farms that have mushroomed all over the place, with Cyprus known to have little or insufficient wind power.
But instead of waiting for another disaster to strike, perhaps Cyprus should follow Virgin entrepreneur Richard Branson’s example, who has called for a “long-term Marshall Plan” for the battered British Virgin Islands, and for the Caribbean to be “reconstructed and rejuvenated with clean energy and new jobs”.
The hurricanes have causing unimaginable destruction, particularly to small island states, where in many cases the infrastructure has collapsed.
Perhaps we should rid ourselves of inefficient infrastructure and rebuild our entire energy sphere, without having to wait for a major event to force us to build a new one. Only then will energy output and consumption costs come down and help make the economy competitive, once again.
