Reacting to comments in this morning's Financial Times interview with Ed Miliband, in which he says the
government will not rule out new coal plants that don't capture and bury their
emissions, Greenpeace executive director John
Sauven said:
Posted by jossc — 22 December 2008 at 3:51pm
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Ed Miliband demonstrated the confusion at the of the heart of the government's energy and climate change strategies this morning when he refused to rule out new coal plants which don't capture and bury their emissions – just weeks after his own advisers warned there was no future for these power plants.
He attacked Conservative plans for the introduction of green standards for power stations that would rule out the dirtiest coal plants like E.ON's for Kingsnorth, as "knee jerk" and "not thought through". Apparently, he's happy to play party politics with coal and climate change, just days after he called for a people-powered movement on global warming. Hardly the way to inspire action on the most important issue of our time.
Posted by jossc — 10 December 2008 at 3:34pm
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Clean coal technology like this is at work right now in a coal-fired power station near you
Energy companies putting in bids to run new coal-fired power stations have been quick to seize upon carbon capture and storage (CCS) as the ideal solution to their biggest problem - explaining why they're so keen to return to using the dirtiest fossil-fuel possible at a time when we need to cut CO2 emissions dramatically to reign-in climate change.
Posted by jossc — 4 December 2008 at 12:15pm
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The Turner Report - a nail in the coffin of coal-fired power?
Lord Turner's Committee on Climate Change, which reported to the government on Monday, has gone a long way towards ruling out new coal plants like Kingsnorth from playing a role in any future UK energy mix.
The science of climate change is unequivocal – to avoid catastrophic impacts, industrialised countries like the UK must make steep and urgent reductions in their carbon dioxide emissions. This means that it is unacceptable to build new unabated coal-fired power stations in the UK.
This joint statement from Greenpeace, WWF, Friends of the Earth and the RSPB calls on the government to:
Posted by jossc — 22 July 2008 at 3:31pm
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Stop Climate Chaos activists were at Kingsnorth in Kent this morning to urge the Prime Minister to abandon plans for a new generation of coal-fired power plants. They planted flags outside the existing power station as a symbol of opposition to Kingsnorth 2, a new development which, if it gets the go-ahead, will be the first new coal plant to be built in the UK for 30 years.
Developer E.ON UK plans to demolish the existing plant and replace it with a new coal-fired unit that is 20 per cent cleaner. But coal is the dirtiest, most carbon-intensive fuel known to mankind, and despite the industry's efforts to talk up 'clean coal' technologies like carbon capture and storage (CCS), such developments are in their infancy and would not be available for at least a decade, even if they can be made to work.
A call by David Cameron's favourite think tank for a radical new approach to UK energy policy was today echoed by the UK's biggest green groups. Policy Exchange is calling for the kind of greenhouse gas efficiency standard that is applied to cars to now be applied to power stations. The call comes on the same day that Greenpeace, WWF, Friends of the Earth and the RSPB released a joint recommendation for the introduction of a tough new performance standard of 350g of CO2 per kilowatt hour for power plants.
