Talking point: Renewable energies

This week's talking point focuses on the environment and renewable energy. Before getting together with the members of your conversation group, you may decide to think about the questions below, so that you deal with vocabulary difficulties beforehand.

What are the main threats to the environment these days?
What environmental disasters can you think of?
Is Spain protecting the environment enough?
How green are you?
How big is your ecological footprint?
In what ways does the destruction of the environment affect us directly?
Are renewable energies (solar, hydroelectric, wind energy) the solution to environmental problems?
What are the advantages of the traditional energy (petrol, gas, coal) over the renewable one? Comment on the following aspects:
• Pollution (air pollution, acoustic pollution, and so on)
• Impact on the environment and landscape
• Influence on the economy
• Solutions to the energy crisis (individual, institutional, political)

Discuss these environmentally-related issues:
Is recycling the only way to be green?
Is public transport a real alternative to the problems of transport these days?
Congestion charges in big cities.
Buying locally produced goods.
There’s too much unnecessary packaging in supermarkets these days.
Global warming: a reality or a threatening political weapon.
Hybrid and electric cars.

To gain further insight into the topic you may wish to watch this Guardian video on the Chinese desert province of Gansu, which is at the front line of China's efforts to reinvent its economy with a massive investment in renewable energy. You can find the transcript below.

You may also be interested in watching this 2002 video intended for students in Seconday School, in which geographer Daniel Raven-Ellison visited a coal fired power station, a hydro-electric power station and a wind farm to find out which might be best.

Something very remarkable is happening in Gansu, a desert province that once marked the far western border of China. The Great Wall starts here. The silk road passes through these plains, but for most of the past 30 years this region has been most notorious for remoteness, dryness and a dirty fossil fuel industry.
This is where China’s first oil fields were drilled, where many coal mines opened and where steel makers sighted some of their biggest factories. But that image is now undergoing a stunning transformation. The deserts around Jojuen city are now a key asset. The cluster of wind farms here has expanded from almost nothing three years ago to now being the largest in China, and are on course to becoming the biggest in the world.
The capacity of Jojuen’s mills is now 6 gigawatts, roughly equivalent to the entire wind energy capacity of the UK, and the plan in the future is to more than triple that by 2015.
China is also experimenting with solar power, as I found when I drove farther west. 
(1’40”-2’10” someone talking in Chinese)
There are still major challenges. Cleaning the photovoltaic of dust requires considerable amounts of water, no small matter in a desert. More importantly, solar and wind power prices are also significantly higher than those of coal.
But thanks to hefty government support and technology improvement, the gap is closing and it will close more in the future. China is determined to dominate the global renewable sector. It’s motivated by economic, strategic and environmental reasons.
Here in the desert of Gansu China is trying to reinvent itself. The world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide is moving to become a leading force in renewable energy. It’s not yet a green  superpower. The country will remain heavily dependent on coal and other fossil fuels for decades to come, but if giant demonstration plots like this one in Dongguan can succeed and be expanded upon, China could provide a model, a development that is cleaner and greener and that other countries around the world could follow.