SO giant County Hall and other Lancashire County Council offices in Preston are to be powered by "green" electricity, generated either by wind power or derived from so-called "bio-mass" of forestry or agricultural waste.

With the latter in mind, I cannot help wondering whether all this is just so much bull.

I mean, how can this be other than a dollop of pious environmental propaganda?

After all, despite the County Council being in a commitment by which supplier Yorkshire Electricity buys a unit of such "green" power for each unit of electricity it sells to the County Council, how on earth can anyone tell whether the juice coming down the cables to LCC premises in Preston, or anywhere else for that matter, comes from cow muck or from a messy old coal-fired power station?

Do they really think folk are so dim as to be impressed by such sanctimonious pantomime? Wouldn't they do much more for the environment if they gave every household a free low-energy light-bulb and spared us the goody-goodiness?