But the UK has better wind and tidal potential than most, so its energy mix will be more complex. Australia has 200 times more sunlight per person than the UK, which is the fifth worst major country in the world on the sunlight per person stakes (ahead of Bangladesh, Belgium, the Netherlands and Rwanda). The precise energy mix – plenty of solar with significant bits of wind, hydro and tidal – will vary from place to place. There are issues of distribution and storage, but the solutions to these problems are also coming along nicely. Neither the cost nor the resource use is prohibitive. An area of solar panels 228 sq miles in a sunny part of the world could harness our entire global energy supply. Today’s global energy supply is only one seven-thousandth of the energy from the sun that lands on the planet. Photograph: Paul Glendell/Alamy Is it realistic to transform our energy supply? The UK’s energy mix will be more complex, blending solar, wind and tidal. So, a bit of flying is still OK, but not as much. Short-distance electric flights are almost becoming feasible but the need to save weight means that at the moment liquid hydrocarbons are the only suitable fuel for a long-haul flight. There are three options: biofuel (but the strain on our land is huge), synthetic fuels generated using solar power (but we already need all the solar power we can get), and fossil fuel counterbalanced with a mechanism for taking carbon back out of the air (but we do not yet know how to do this properly, and when we find out, we will already need to be doing this as fast as we can to mitigate non-flying climate impacts). Because of some complex high-altitude effects, the climate change impact of this is perhaps double what it would be if we burned that fuel on the runway.

Here is an inconvenient reality: a long-distance plane will typically burn though about 100 tonnes of fuel, turning it into almost four times that weight in carbon dioxide. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian Is it OK to fly? A long-distance flight will typically use about 100 tonnes of fuel.

Mike berners lee no planet b