Funny that nobody's mentioned it lately, but you may vaguely remember the promise that Britain would produce 10% of its electricity from renewable sources - mostly wind - by the end of the last decade. Now, do you remember anyone leaping about and saying it was wonderful we kept that promise and that we are on course for a green, low-carbon future?  No, because it didn't happen. We didn't even come close. It is time to think again.  The figures that exposed the scale of our country's failure were published last week by a charity called the Renewable Energy Foundation. The Department of Energy and Climate Change remained entirely silent on this decadal failure. By the end of 2010 Britain had managed to generate a pathetic 6.5% of its electricity from renewable sources, despite spending ?5 billion on wind farm subsidies and stifling all local opposition to wind turbines. Compare that record with Germany or Spain, each of which produces 16% of electricity from wind and solar (although Spain has almost stopped as it can no longer afford the subsidy).  You may think that with China building two new coal plants a week, adding vastly more carbon to the Earth's atmosphere than we do, it makes little difference that Britain came 35% short of reaching the target for renewables announced by Brian Wilson, then the Labour energy minister, in 2001. and you'd be right. You also might say that "targets" were the Blair government's way of having something to say on Question Time while doing very little. Right there, too.  The sad truth is that policies on renewables under this government are as ineffective as under the last one. So why, if they don't work, are we doing more of the same? That seems to be what Chris Huhne's energy department has in mind. It now has a glossy, legally binding European Union target that will require Britain to generate 30% of its electricity from renewables by 2020. That means harnessing about 10 times as much offshore wind as we have managed since 2001 during the next nine years.  Does anyone seriously think that will happen? Privately, officials don't, because investment has dried up. Publicly, our politicians go on saying it will, because nobody wants to be the first politician in Europe to say the EU renewables target will have to go. However, it will, because not only do we have little hope of meeting these targets, but there are also signs that the cost attached to Huhne's plans for electricity market reform will be too much for the consumer to bear.  These are gloomy times for those of us who want a low carbon future, even if it is nuclear - particularly after Japan last week upgraded its estimate of the level of damage to the reactors at Fukushima to level 7, the same as Chernobyl, which is bound to create all sorts of obstacles to getting the first new nuclear plant built by 2018.  So here's a cheerful thought: there is a way to reduce our carbon emissions as much as we need, and on time, far more cheaply than by building renewables. We just have to give up the green mantra that the only way to cut our carbon emissions is renewable energy. If we step back and look carefully at the problem, we see the fastest way of cutting our carbon emissions is to burn gas, which produces half as much carbon as coal. The discovery of shale gas in frie