Focus on green energy backed by leading MP

The Liberal Democrat MP delivered the fifth annual Trust Lecture and spoke about the need to invest in renewable technologies: "We can have green growth, or we can have no growth at all. The job of government is to chart a course which will safeguard the nation, whatever the future may hold and the obvious policy must be to encourage resource-frugal growth," he says.

Gail says the issues were extremely relevant for young people. "There are no easy answers to the renewables question and their generation will continue to grapple with the challenging interface between economics and energy resources for many years to come." At Southampton, she is researching the use of trees and woody plants as sources of renewable energy for heat, power and more recently for liquid biofuels such as bioethanol - the so called ‘second generation' bioenergy crops.