Tonight in coastal Suffolk a public meeting will take place on a subject more vital than anything that hangs on next month’s General Election.

Politicians both local and national will speak, but they won’t be seeking votes. The meeting was arranged before the election was called and its repercussions will extend a lot longer than the next five years.

It’s a matter literally of life and death. Potentially the lives and deaths of thousands, maybe millions, not yet born. Lives that may be centuries – possibly many centuries – in the future.

The question at issue is nuclear power. Specifically, whether or not a new reactor should be erected at Sizewell.

No one at the meeting in Woodbridge – where the chief guest speaker will be Baroness Jenny Jones, who represents the Green Party in the House of Lords – has the power to give Sizewell C either the red or green light. But they can make the public more aware of an issue that affects all our lives, and will do so more than many realise.

The building process could cause huge disruption locally. The aftermath could be grave over a far wider area.

Some quite serious people argue that nuclear power is necessary to help us meet our commitment to curbing carbon emissions and slowing global warming. It should give pause for thought that the one party that makes environmental issues its top priority thinks otherwise.

It is true that the age of fossil fuel is drawing to a close. And none too soon, either. The evidence has been around for a long time – and is now overwhelming – that burning coal, oil and gas in great quantities has a devastating effect on the world’s climate.

Humanity’s addiction to oil has caused wars and economic calamities too, but that’s almost a side issue.
So we need, desperately, to move on. But to what?

There are numerous possibilities, some of them quite exciting. What is required is a mix of energy sources. All feeding into the system, no single one so dominant that its failure would bring the whole system down. Or so powerful that whoever controls it controls everything.

Wind power is perhaps the most obvious, the most visible, right here right now. Frankly, I don’t understand those who object to it. No, it can’t provide all our needs, but then we don’t want it to – and it can make a valuable contribution.

As can solar power – even here. The Nevada Desert could power North America. Given the political will – and currently unfeasible co-operation between nations – the Sahara could probably power Europe.

Our rooftops could heat our homes. Our black road surfaces could generate a lot of the power it takes to travel on them. Then there’s wave and tidal power, and geothermal energy. There are even possibilities in rainwater. It’s all there, just waiting to be tapped.

Some of it may sound futuristic, but any of it could be on-stream a lot sooner than Sizewell C. Almost certainly at a fraction of the cost.

Endlessly renewable sources could already be powering everything we need if the billions poured into the great nuclear experiment had been spent instead on the right research and development.

Switching now from nukes to renewables would surely provide more jobs. And it would do all that without creating piles of deadly waste no one knows how to get rid of.

Without the risk of an East Anglian Fukushima or Chernobyl.

• The free public meeting “Sizewell C and Suffolk’s Environment”, looking at the local effects of the development plan, will be at 7.30 this evening in Woodbridge Community Hall.
• For more information on the issues, see sagesuffolk.com

Remember Fukushima? It was big news in March 2011 when the nuclear plant was overwhelmed by a tsunami, causing multiple reactor meltdowns. The world’s attention has turned away since then.

But there’s still a no-go area where 150,000 people used to live. There’s still at least several decades of work ahead decommissioning the devastated plant. And the wider long-term effects are still incalculable.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company originally estimated that dismantling the plant would cost about £16million. Last week the Japanese government revised that figure to £82billion – plus another £20bn to remove radioactive topsoil, trees and buildings.

As soon as those figures were released, experts were warning that they were still over-optimistic. But all this playing with numbers is really just evidence of our obsession with money ahead of anything that actually matters.

As science journalist Madhusree Mukerjee says: “I find it hard to believe that this plant can be cleaned up at all, no matter how much they spend on it.

“The molten cores will be too dangerous to get near to for half a century at least. Plus, Japan has no repository for high-level nuclear waste, and given the earthquake danger, it is unlikely to ever have one.

“All that contaminated topsoil – where will they put it? It just sits around in plastic bags and gets dispersed again each time there is a typhoon.”

Meanwhile, closer to home, there’s this news, which was not as widely published as it might have been.
Since 2000, convoys carrying nuclear weapons along UK roads have had 180 “mishaps and incidents”, including collisions, breakdowns and brake failures.

Not a lot of people know that. The fact that you now do is just one reason to be grateful for the Freedom of Information Act.

You may think I’m being ignorant or ingenuous here in linking a story about nuclear power with one about nuclear weapons – but I’m not. The two are inextricably linked, and not just by the dangers that apply to both.

There is really no plausible reason to invest in nuclear energy other than its covert role in making material for weapons. Which is why if we’re to calculate the true cost of Trident renewal, we should also factor in the enormous sums the government seems willing to pour into Hinkley, Bradwell and Sizewell.

Though that, of course, is to repeat that potentially catastrophic error of trying to put a cash value on things too big and dangerous to be measured in terms of mere finance.

Power vacuums. Power generation. Power to the people – or against the people, or over the people. When you look at it from a few different angles, it begins to seem power is at the heart of most of humanity’s problems. As well as being crucial to any hope of resolving them.

Has a reliable way of selecting a good government ever been devised? And, in the rare case of good government being achieved, is there any way of keeping it on the right course?

A quick look round the corridors of power across the world right now might make you doubt it. Then again, I don’t think right now is anything special. Pick any time and place in history and your chance of landing on an unequivocally sound government is pretty slim.

It’s not just that there may be something dodgy about those who seek power. There are decent and honourable reasons for wanting to call the shots, but there are also plenty of less worthy motivations. The worthy may or may not be outnumbered, but they are sadly likely to be outplayed by the less scrupulous.

And then, as they say, power corrupts. A saying which is true of more kinds of power than the purely political sort.
Financial power may be the greatest corrupter – or lure to the already corrupt – of all. And as for the kind of power you hook up to when you turn your key in the ignition or insert your three-pin plug in the wall-socket…

The Amazon rainforest is under threat. We all know this by now, and we probably all know several good reasons why it’s a bad thing. But what power do we have to save it?

The forest may be the lungs of the Earth, but there are powerful predators wanting to take chunks out of it.

The Brazilian government is planning right now to grant permission for 42 massive dams to be built right through the heart of the forest. What for? Well, power of course.

Power to drive an increasingly electricity-dependent society. And, inevitably, the power of big global business cash.
Never mind that flooding the forest will drown vast numbers of already endangered animals and plantlife. And deprive the survivors of livable habitat.

With each dam submerging vast areas of rainforest under deep water, hundreds if not thousands of monkeys, tapirs, anteaters and birds could perish, pushing precious species closer to the brink of extinction. 

Never mind that the flooding will displace thousands of people who won’t benefit in any way from all that generated power. Though it may well force them into dependency, the newest and poorest members of a modern society they’d be better off not knowing or understanding.

That’s progress for you. That’s power.

The building of just one dam means the destruction of hundreds of square miles of rainforest. The recently-completed Belo Monte dam wiped out huge areas of forest, then failed to produce anywhere near its power targets. Once built, it wasn’t fit for purpose. But the damage done cannot be reversed.

Another 42 dams adds up to a catastrophic level of devastation. A catastrophe not just for the indigenous people and the native wildlife, but for the world.

And in a way it’s not fair to blame the Brazilian government too much. They, after all, like governments everywhere, are in the power of global corporations.

Which is to say, governed by market forces. Except that the term “market forces” is a weaselly way of making it sound like something natural, something inevitable.

Taking the spotlight off the powerful people who call the shots. The faceless men (they’re mostly men) in international boardrooms who care a lot about their own money – their own power – and not at all about the jaguar, the toucan, the tapir, the princess flower or the forest people.
 
 
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A spirit-crushing prospect for the environment 

Brexit, we keep being told, means Brexit. Which means what, exactly?

I’m fairly sure nobody voted for a concerted attack on the environment. But among many things we stand to lose by leaving the EU are decades of hard-won progress on clean water, clean air and wildlife habitat.

One pro-Brexit Tory, George Eustice, called European nature protections “spirit-crushing”. Which is itself a pretty spirit-crushing thought.

From the day of the vote, all kinds of undesirables have taken it as a licence to emerge from the cupboard. We’ve heard about the racists, we’ve heard about those who want to rid us of human rights and decent working conditions. Now it seems there’s even a climate sceptic group called “Clexit” that wants to abandon last year’s Paris agreement on greenhouse gas emissions.

You’d have thought by now that the climate-change denier would have gone the same way as the flat-earther. Except for one thing. There’s no money in claiming the world’s flat.