What luck that newspapers could slap "spy murder row poisons relations with Russia" over the front pages yesterday just ahead of publication of the white paper on energy.

Fears about future dependency on the likes of Vladimir Putin for our gas supplies are enough to drive all but the most ardent environmentalists into the pro-nuclear camp. With North Sea oil and gas running down fast, security of supply has overtaken global warming as the key driver of government policy.

It is one thing for Gordon Brown to be forgiven by a future electorate for Britain missing its carbon targets, it's another to preside over the lights going out because Russia has put a bung in the gas pipes that feed our power stations.

But it's not that simple in the real world. Gas from Russia is never likely to provide more than 20% at most of Britain's gas, with the rest coming from Anglophile nations such as Norway or arriving by LNG vessel from Qatar.

Britain has other options, with wind, wave and other renewables combining with clean coal to ensure that the power remains on - at a time when the UK has not scratched the surface on energy-efficiency measures.

The fear is that these alternatives will be crowded out by a rush to nuclear with everyone's energy and money being channelled into large-scale, centralised atomic power, which is still bedevilled with concerns about vulnerability to terrorist attack and costs.

And just as nuclear must not push out alternatives, the inevitably noisy debate must not obscure the message, rightly stressed by Alistair Darling yesterday, that however our electricity is generated, we need to use less of it.

The government talks a lot about energy efficiency and will need to deliver. So must the rest of us: lagging the loft; using smart meters to track how and when we use power; not leaving the TV or video on standby. Not earth-shattering perhaps but potentially Earth saving. The last alone would save 7% of all the electricity used at home - the equivalent of two 600MW gas-fired power stations or 1,500 wind turbines.

Think about it.

Will Merv swerve?

The City got frightfully excited yesterday when the Bank of England released the minutes of this month's meeting of the monetary policy committee. Sterling soared and interest rate futures signalled that borrowing costs are heading for 6% by Christmas after it was revealed that some MPC members - presumably the ultra-hawks Tim Besley and Andrew Sentance - floated the idea of a half-point rise.

Why this should have been such a surprise is hard to fathom. Inflation was more than a percentage point above its target; Mervyn King had written an explanatory missive to Gordon Brown; the economy has little or no spare capacity; the stock market and the housing market are both rising rapidly. Wouldn't it be strange had the MPC not toyed with the idea that it should deviate from the incremental strategy to interest-rate rises of the past decade?

If the economy grows in line with the Bank's forecasts, rates certainly will rise, but increasing them next month - as some in the City think probable - would present the MPC with presentational difficulties. The Bank insists that there is no such thing as a done deal when the MPC convenes once a month; instead, the decision depends on the message from the data. If anything, the data since the May rate rise have been weaker than expected, so by rights we should expect no change in June.

So, if rates are raised it will be tantamount to an admission from the MPC that it has fallen behind the curve.