[A-List] Coal makes a dirty comeback

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

How can we keep the lights on in an era of mounting concern about global warming?

by Mark Lynas

New Statesman (April 16 2007)


A few months ago I made the prediction that, thanks to the high level of concern
about climate change, no new coal-fired power stations could ever be built in
this country. I was wrong. Not only are new coal plants in the planning stages,
but carbon dioxide emissions are rising again right across the power generation
sector, thanks to a switch back from gas to coal. Most worrying of all, coal
still seems to get a much easier ride than other, more greenhouse-friendly
technologies, which are increasingly being stymied by opposition groups.

Take the following Reuters report, from this month. "A political storm is
looming over one of Britain's first wave power projects", it relates, "which
surfers fear will drain energy from the waves they ride along the Atlantic coast".
The controversy centres on the Wave Hub, a sort of socket-on-the-seabed, which
prototype wave-generation machines will be able to plug into to feed power into
the grid. The hub is proposed just ten miles offshore from St Ives in Cornwall;
the various devices using it will seek to harvest energy from the same Atlantic
swells that bring thousands of surfers each year to the beaches and breaks -
hence the opposition.

One surfer posting to the Britsurf bulletin board warns against a "wave shadow"
from the project and the eventual creation of a "barrage of energy removal
installations all down the coast". He continues: "Come on surfers - wake up.
It's your surf they are trying to steal ... Energy generation from waves is just
not on, on any scale." Sound familiar? Here's what one campaigner said about the
now-cancelled Whinash windfarm, which would have provided green electricity to
110,000 homes: "We should not be placing an experimental form of electricity
production in some of our finest landscapes". More wind projects are cancelled
due to campaigns by local objectors than ever get approved.

So if we can't generate renewable power on either land or sea thanks to the
efforts of the objectors, how are we going to keep the lights on in an era of
mounting concern about global warming? Alas, this question has no easy answer,
and in the meantime the electricity generating sector is increasingly turning
back to the dirtiest fuel of all: coal. According to the environmental group WWF,
emissions from UK power stations have risen by nearly a third in the past eight
years, calling the government's entire climate-change strategy into question.
All the gains from the "dash for gas" have now been wiped out by the slide back
towards coal.

At the end of last year, E.ON UK announced plans to build two new coal-fired
units at its plant in Kingsnorth. I often hear complaints about how China is
constructing too many coal-fired power stations, but how can we object to
Chinese emissions when the same process is going on in Kent? While E.ON insists
that the new units will be more efficient, the reality is that they will lock in
high UK emissions for decades to come, at just the time when there should be a
blanket ban on coal construction. E.ON also suggests, rather weakly, that the
new plants "could eventually be fitted with carbon capture kit" for burying
carbon dioxide underground, despite this being an unproven technology that has
not yet been adopted anywhere in the world.

Although the power sector does come under the umbrella of the EU's Emissions
Trading Scheme, the record so far is not good: timid European governments last
year handed out more pollution permits than their industries actually ended up
using, knocking the bottom out of the emerging carbon market and delivering
windfall profits to the biggest polluters on the continent.

Meanwhile, on 6 April, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change produced
the second of its major reports, this time on the impacts of global warming -
including a predicted mass extinction of species and four-fifths disappearance
of the Himalayan glaciers. Some scientists remain stubbornly optimistic, however,
insisting that the worst-case scenarios will not materialise. Says Harvard
University's James McCarthy: "The worst stuff is not going to happen because we
can't be that stupid".

Can't we?


http://www.newstatesman.com/200704160021


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