Demolition job

Until a few months ago, whenever I looked out of my living room window, I could see an imposing, traditional Maltese home, notable for its age and character.

That house of character is now no more. It has been purchased by a foreigner – from another foreigner – who has demolished most of it.

The first thing to be destroyed was a flight of steps leading to the spacious terrace in front of the house in order to park huge trucks beside it.

Then, most of the long terrace wall was dismantled in order to haul out of the house truckloads of beautifully aged limestone bricks, red soil from the garden at the back, and rubble.

What’s left of the interior of the house, behind the damaged facade, looks like a war zone.

The house is in such a ruined state that I don’t see how anything good will come out of it.

So there goes another lost heirloom of St Julian’s architectural heritage!

John Guillaumier – St Julian’s

Switch them off

An aerial view of a nuclear power plant in France. Photo: Shutterstock.com

This summer’s heat waves in the northern hemisphere (and floods elsewhere) should have left no one in any doubt about the reality of global warming, but how are we going to manage to deal with the serious problem we’ve created?

The United Nations’ secretary general warns us about our “boiling planet”. Perhaps he should start by asking the big polluters in which decade they envisage all their electricity generation will be “green”, that is, when will all their fossil fuel power stations be shut down?

Telling us when internal combustion vehicle production will stop is not enough – electric vehicles should not be charging their batteries from fossil fuel-generated electricity. Power station fuel should be only “green” hydrogen or nuclear (zero carbon emissions).

The UN and international talking shops should be concentrating on when this power station fuel conversion is going to be finalised.

President Charles de Gaulle was wise in insisting that France goes for nuclear power, and more than 80 per cent of its electricity generation is nuclear – it also helped France avoid being threatened by a despotic dictatorship with cutting off its gas supply. Initially two-thirds of the French public was against nuclear power but now two-thirds are in favour.

France is building several new nuclear power stations to plan ahead for future electricity demand. Finland has followed suit, recently commissioning the largest and most modern nuclear power station in Europe. In the meantime, other countries have shut down their nuclear power stations and are building new coal-fired ones.

The UN and the EU should be asking, every so often, in which decade are the fossil fuel power stations going to be switched off.

Albert Cilia-Vincenti – Attard