So this is frightening;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-29987033
Surely no one will stand in the way of this in the current political climate. The operators are going to apply for planning permission to build their plant, but not to vent their exhaust gases into our atmosphere, which they can do willy-nilly. Can you imagine an application lodged in the 1800s for a project to double the concentration of the most spctroscopically active component of the atmosphere over two hundred years? (Risk control - 'doesn't matter, we'll all be dead by the time the down side materialises').
An excellent old university tutor of mine thinks that we should suspend democracy;
http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Survival-Governance-Biosphere-Crisis/dp/0953299090
and he is a reasonable, cautious and gentle man. I like a hot bath and a holiday in the sun as much as the next naked ape. I also have unseemly hope in the moral character of the high-status apes to whom I delegate important decisions.