Through sometimes bitter experience, Bermuda residents have learned to be wary of "foreign experts", whose recommendations either fail to fit Bermuda's circumstances or get ignored almost as soon as they have been uttered.

But Bermuda should pay attention to environment expert and Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. John Byrne, who was featured in yesterday's newspaper and spoke last night on the need for a national energy policy.

Dr. Byrne, who won the Nobel Prize as part of a team investigating climate change, made a series of sensible recommendations about how Bermuda could deal with the issue and the sister problem of our dependence on fossil fuels for energy.

He was neither alarmist nor incendiary.

It was good to hear, although not surprising, that Bermuda's per capita carbon consumption is half that of industrialised nations like the US.

And he had praise for our system of freshwater collection, our limits on car ownership and tax incentives for "green" technologies. Some of these ideas can be adopted elsewhere, he said.

None of that should diminish the threat that Bermuda and other small islands face from climate change, nor our responsibility to be better caretakers of the Island and the planet.

As Dr. Byrne suggested, Government's Green Paper on energy should set a target of gaining ten to 20 percent of electricity from renewable sources by 2015 – just seven years away.

And we are well placed to do that. For an Island where the sun shines most of the time, we have failed to adopt solar power in any meaningful way. And for an Island where the wind blows more than it doesn't we have not done much to harness that resource either.

There are many reasons for that, not least cost and fear of technologies that are still improving, but now the time has come to act.

But it also means Bermuda could achieve such a target relatively quickly. Dr. Byrne rightly said that there is no "silver bullet" to stop or reverse climate change. And Bermuda can do much more, as he suggested.

Requirements can be put in place to make buildings more energy-efficient, and these measures can be incorporated into the building code. Similarly, older buildings that improve their energy efficiency could receive land tax rebates or reductions.

Dr. Byrne rightly pointed out that some solutions may end up doing more harm than good. An electric bike imported from Asia might result in more carbon use getting the bike here than the energy savings gained while it is in operation.

In the recent series of public meetings organised by the new Department of Energy, more ideas and technologies have been discussed. And as Energy Minister Terry Lister and his staff prepare the Green Paper on energy use, they no doubt will include other proposals as well.

Clearly, they all need to be examined carefully to determine what is feasible for Bermuda. But the overarching aim must be clear. Bermuda needs to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels and carbon generating technologies as quickly as possible.

The alternative does not bear thinking about.