The chinese are bringing on 1 new coal fired station on line a month for the next 3 years(without even running F.G.D -Too expensive for them to run!) they also have no opposition, but the UK wants to bring in 2-3 (with FGD-Scrubs and CC) of them and out come the tree huggers!

On the other hand, they also seem pretty keen on coal - here for example they’re talking about how happy they are to get an engineering contract at a coal-fired power plant in Indonesia.

Anti-coal, biased and already discounted? Interesting, but also inaccurate. You’re going to have to do better than that!

[Our] report considered six scenarios for meeting Britain’s commitments to deliver on the binding EU renewable energy commitments for 2020, and for future electricity demand (drawing on both EU and UK targets for energy efficiency), and assessed whether any additional capacity from conventional sources [i.e. big power plants] would be needed to secure the UK’s electricity needs. It concluded that there would be no role for such plants, even taking into account the very few days when there is little or no wind. These scenarios represent a radical shift away from the ‘business as usual’ pathway (under which new power stations may indeed be needed). But such a radical shift is precisely what is required by the Government’s stated ambitions on renewables and energy efficiency.

So, according to the government, who are hardly the progressive renewable energy enthusiasts we’d like them to be, we don’t need big new power stations.

As for ‘clean coal’, it’s a nice idea, but that’s all it is! It doesn’t work on any large scale and certainly wouldn’t make new power plants clean. You might as well argue that we should be building nuclear fusion plants - according to industry it will be at least twenty years before carbon capture technology is advanced enough to start cutting emissions - if it wo0rks at all. That’s no good if we need to be cutting emissions within the next five years!

Sorry if this is a rant! was not meant to be.

Things are probably better than they were - tougher environmental standards mean plants have to be cleaner these days. But there hasn’t been an effort to address carbon dioxide emissions - and we know it’s those that are cooking the planet. As far as CO2 is concerned, coal is as dirty as ever.

‘Long live coal’ seems like a weird thing to say - should we really be that attached to a technology? Surely if we can meet our power needs with investment in clean renewables and energy efficiency that’s a more elegant solution? Certainly, it would be a more efficient one - those cooling towers you’re pointing to represent a load of wasted heat energy - around 50% of the energy in the coal in the first place!

Long live humanity, I say - and that means ditching inefficient, polluting old coal.

Isn’t that what people said about all fossil fuels in the Industrial Revolution and about oil until recently?