The black heart of Wales’ “green” giant
The rhetoric sounds good - the reality is set to be a total disaster. In theory, the government has promised that any new coal-fired power stations in the UK will be obliged to use carbon capture and storage, and it wants to use Aberthaw station in south Wales as a testing ground the scheme. But if its actions over the proposed Kingsnorth station in Kent are anything to go by, not only does it have no intention of complying with its own policy, it is fully aware that the possibility of operational carbon capture and storage is decades away at best - time the climate science is telling us we don’t have. If our burning of coal expands in this period rather than being cut back, this will push us straight into the danger zone. Aberthaw power station is the biggest polluter in Wales, scoring top of the league not only for emissions of carbon dioxide, but also for nitrous oxide and sulphur dioxide, both harmful greenhouse gases. In October the plant announced its plans to develop carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology ahead of a competition for government funding. So has this dirtiest of industries really gone green?
Don’t get your hopes up. According to Jonathan Porritt, chair of the UK’s Sustainable Development Commission, the amount of money government and business are investing in CCS development is “pathetic”. As recently-released internal documents from the planning process for Kingsnorth coal-fired power station in Kent reveal, the government has caved to pressure to exclude even the suggestion of CCS from its plans. And even the more optimistic predictions cannot foresee the technology being available to apply for a long, long while. Shell, an enthusiast about the technology, doesn’t foresee CCS being widely available for implementation until 2050 at the earliest. By this date, the chance for humanity to avert lethal, runaway climate change will be long gone. But this prediction may be overly optimistic - as UK Chancellor Alistair Darling has put it, commercially viable carbon capture and storage technology “might never become available”. If coal-fired stations are allowed to continue polluting instead of being phased out, in other words, it is game over for UK climate policy.
As James Hansen, the NASA scientist and US’s leading climate change researcher has put it, burning coal has the capacity to take us to a drastically different planet. An alternative is readily available - renewable energy has been shown to be the most popular option with the British public, and Britain itself has been shown to be capable of switching to renewable energy production quickly, without compromising the wellbeing of the public. What is certain is that fossil fuels are not going to last forever - we need to wean ourselves off them sooner or later. Whether we do so as soon as possible, or leaving a legacy of climate chaos for this and future generations, is our choice. Faced with these options, in the middle of this emergency, what are we waiting for?
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