drax

Thirty climate campaigners today stopped a coal train on its way to Drax power station in Yorkshire, Britain's single largest source of CO2 emissions. Dressed in white overalls and canary outfits, they used safety signals to stop the train at a bridge on a branch line used exclusively by the power station, before jumping aboard and shovelling coal off onto the tracks. Some used climbing ropes to suspend themselves under the bridge from the train, making it impossible to move the train while the protest continues.

Silly question I know. A coal plant is a coal plant is a coal plant - still the dirtiest form of power generation known to us, no matter which way you look at it. But now that more and more people are uneasily waking up to the fact that the government are about to sanction a new generation of the things, suddenly we're knee-deep in spin about how environmentally friendly they could become. How surprising.

First there's been a great slew of CCS 'clean coal' stories. Carbon capture and storage may be theoretically feasible but it's expensive (up to twice the cost of unabated coal), technically complicated (involving deep cooling the CO2 into liquid form and creating a network to pump it out back under the North Sea where our oil and gas reserves originally resided) and commercially untried (so far no one is keen to pay for it themselves).