The stakes could not be higher. Everything hinges on stopping coal
As soon as I have finished this column I will jump on the train to Kent. Last year Al Gore remarked “I can’t understand why there aren’t rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants.”(1) Like hundreds of honorary young people, I am casting my Zimmer frame aside to answer the call.
Everything now hinges on stopping coal. Whether we prevent runaway climate change largely depends on whether we keep using the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel. Unless we either leave it in the ground or leave the carbon dioxide it produces in the ground, human development will start spiralling backwards. The more coal is burnt, the smaller are our chances of future comfort and prosperity. The industrial revolution has gone into reverse.
It is not because of polar bears that I will be joining the climate camp outside the coal plant at Kingsnorth. It is not because of butterflies or frogs or penguins or rainforests, much as I love them all. It is because everything I have fought for and that all campaigners for social justice have ever fought for – food, clean water, shelter, security – is jeopardised by climate change. Those who claim to identify a conflict between environmentalism and humanitarianism have either failed to read the science or have refused to understand it.
Our government could lead the world in one of two directions. Roughly one third of our power stations will come to the end of their lives by 2020. It could replace them with low-carbon plants or it could repeat – this time in full knowledge of the consequences – the disastrous decisions of the past. E.on’s application to build a new coal-burning power station at Kingsnorth is the first for many years. At least five other such proposals hang on the outcome(2). Between them they would account for 54 million tonnes of carbon emissions a year(3): as much as the entire economy would produce if the UK, in line with current science, were to cut its emissions by 90%(4).
The government seems determined to make the wrong decision. It has inherited the party’s traditional love for coal, but, being New Labour, now supports the bosses not the workers, and has colluded with them to make the case for a new generation of power stations. It has one justification for this policy: that one day dirty coal will be transformed into clean coal by means of carbon capture and storage (CCS). All that is needed to effect this transformation is a sprinkling of alchemical dust, in the form of the future price of carbon. The market, it claims, will automatically ensure that coal plants bury their carbon dioxide, as this will be cheaper than buying pollution permits.
Last month the House of Commons environmental audit committee examined this proposition and found that it was nonsense(5). It cited studies by the UK Energy Research Centre and Climate Change Capital which estimate that capturing carbon emissions from existing coal plants will cost 70-100 or 90-155 euros per tonne of CO2. Yet the government predicts that the likely price of carbon between 2013 to 2020 will be around 39 euros per tonne. Even E.on believes that it won’t rise above 50 euros. “The gap between the carbon price and the cost of CCS”, the committee finds, “is enormous.” The energy minister, Malcolm Wicks, confessed to the MPs “I hope that the strengthening of carbon markets … will bring forward a sufficiently good price for carbon that it will provide some of the financial incentive for CCS. Will it be enough? I do not know.”
This is the sum of government policy: to cross its fingers and hope the market delivers. If it approves a new coal plant at Kingsnorth, it will do so on the grounds that the power station will be “CCS-ready”. CCS-ready seems to mean nothing more than this: that there’s enough space on the site for a carbon capture plant, should the developer deign one day to build it. The committee warns that this meaningless promise could be used “as a fig leaf to give unabated coal-fired power stations an appearance of environmental acceptability.”(6)
The government has already shown us what it wants to do. In January, Gary Mohammed, a civil servant at the business department, emailed E.on to ask whether he should include CCS as a condition for approving its new coal plant. (This gives a fascinating insight into how government works: companies are asked to write their own rules). E.on replied that the government “has no right to withhold approval for conventional plant”. Six minutes later Mr Mohammed answered thus: “Thanks. I won’t include. Hope to get the set of draft conditions out today or tomorrow.”(7)
There is a simple means by which the government could ensure that our future electricity supplies would not commit the UK to stoking runaway climate change. It would do as California has done, and set, by a certain date, a maximum level for carbon pollution per megawatt-hour of electricity production. This would have to be a low one: perhaps 80kg of CO2. Then, in line with the government’s precious principles (or absence thereof), it could leave the rest to the market. I have now reached the point at which I no longer care whether or not the answer is nuclear. Let it happen, as long as its total emissions are taken into account, we know exactly how and where the waste is to be buried, how much this will cost and who will pay, and there is a legal guarantee that no civil nuclear materials will be used by the military. We can no longer afford any rigid principle but one: that the harm done to people living now and in the future must be minimised by the most effective means, whatever they might be.
But I believe the likely response would be more interesting than this. Several recent studies have shown how, through maximising the diversity of renewable generators and by spreading them as far apart as possible, by using new techniques for balancing demand with supply and clever schemes for storing energy, between 80 and 100% of our electricity could be produced by renewables, without any loss in the reliability of power supplies(8,9,10). Unlike CCS, wind, wave, tidal, solar, hydro and geothermal power are proven technologies. Unlike nuclear power, they can be safely decommissioned as soon as they become redundant.
A policy like this requires both courage and vision. So look at the current cabinet – Brown, Straw, Darling, Hutton, Blears, Kelly, Hoon – and weep. Every man and woman with backbone was purged from this government years ago, leaving those who know how to appease the interests that might threaten them. These people won’t stand up to business, even when the future prospects of mankind are at stake.
If fear is the only thing that moves them, we must present them with a greater threat than the companies planning new coal plants. We must show that this issue has become a political flashpoint; that the public revulsion towards new coal could help to eject them from office. You could do no better than joining us at Kingsnorth this week.
References:
1. Quoted by Nicholas Kristof, 16th August 2007. The Big Melt. New York Times.
2. Longannet & Cockenzie (Scottish Power); Ferrybridge (Scottish and Southern Energy); Fiddler’s Ferry (Scottish and Southern Energy); Tilbury (RWE npower); Blyth (RWE npower).
3. Greenpeace makes this calculation as follows: “10.6 GW [the generation capacity of the six plants] x 7884 hours of generation per year, assuming 90% operational = 83.57 TWH/y. 83.57 TWH/y x 0.65 = 54 mt/CO2/y”. See footnote 23: http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200708/cmselect/c…
4. The provisional government estimate for the UK’s CO2 emissions in 2007 is 543.7 million tonnes. Defra, July 2008. UK Climate Change Programme. Annual Report to Parliament, July 2008, p9. http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/climatechange/uk/ukccp/pdf/ukccp-ann…
5. House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee, 22nd July 2008 . Carbon capture and
storage. Ninth Report of Session 2007–08. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmselect/cmenvaud/654/...
6. ibid.
7. You can open the emails on this page:
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/media/press-releases/government-climate-pol…
8. German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of Technical Thermodynamics Section Systems Analysis and Technology Assessment, June 2006. Trans-Mediterranean Interconnection for Concentrating Solar Power. Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, Germany. http://www.dlr.de/tt/Portaldata/41/Resources/dokumente/institut/system/p…
9. Mark Barrett, April 2006. A Renewable Electricity System for the UK: A Response to the 2006 Energy Review. UCL Bartlett School Of Graduate Studies – Complex Built Environment Systems Group. http://www.cbes.ucl.ac.uk/projects/energyreview/Bartlett%20Response%20to…
10. Centre for Alternative Technology, 10th July 2007. ZeroCarbonBritain: an alternative energy strategy. This will be made available at www.zerocarbonbritain.com.
Monbiot is mistaken
Turning to nuclear power to combat climate change is like taking up smoking to help loose weight.
Climate change or nuclear pollution? One is not a lesser evil than the other, they just operate over different scales.
Climate change is likely to affect us soon, bringing catastrophe in the next few decades. But it could take many centuries for the legacy of a nuclear powered economy to kill its billions. Spent nuclear fuel remains lethally radioactive for many tens of thousands of years.
Last year I sat in a meeting inside the nuclear power agency of a leading EU government. We were talking about how the EU might dispose of its substantial, ageing and leaky stockpiles of existing nuclear waste. With me were (pro-nuclear)civil servants and government experts on nuclear waste from across the EU. it became clear that there is still no satisfactory solution to this problem.
At the moment spent nuclear fuel is in concentrated form. So a while it is a highly lethal substance that causes cancer and even genetic mutations it seems more containable and tractable as a problem than the vast mega-tonnages of CO2 we emit, which apart from its insulating properties is otherwise harmless. But we have to tightly guard the waste and it isolate from the living environment spent nuclear fuel not for centuries, but millennia. The waste remains dangerous for tens of thousands of years. Over these millennia, it will seep through water cycles, soils and other systems to cover the world.
What political system has figured out what responsibility we have towards the children of a thousand years into the future, who will curse us for this legacy?
Should we press ahead with nuclear power and possibly transfer this climate threat away from our children’s generation, but instead burden a far off future generation with an uninhabitable radioactive planet? Save our kids, but kill someone else’s, in another time?
But is this choice of poisons necessary?
Crises have this horrific momentum – they spur people towards one extreme solution to avoid another. Go nuclear to avert climate change. That’s the ’shock doctrine’, the dynamic of disaster capitalism. When governments and corporations face an outcry over the problems they cause, they can simply take control by imposing their own ’solution’ to the crisis, thus further deepening it. Thus they now promote biofuels or nuclear power as ’solution’ to climate change, GM crops as a solution to hunger and ecological crisis, and more privatisation as a solution to the failures of the market.
Meanwhile, recognition of the central dynamic of the crisis – the competitive drive for profits, increased sales and uncontrolled economic expansion – is forced from the agenda.
Meanwhile my local off-licence has just turned half of its floor space into a walk-in, doorless fridge or ‘beer cooler room’! Crate after crate of beer is now kept nice and cold all day and night. Perhaps it would perish if kept at room temp?
Meanwhile my new DAB radio (Digital Audio Broadcasting)will use between 6 and eight times more power than my old FM one. New flat giant-plasma screen T.V. sets are responsible for four times more CO2 emissions than the old CRT tubes they replace.
Meanwhile capitalists celebrate the growing market for air-conditioning units in the UK!
Meanwhile the majority of people in sunny, dry and richer places like California now use heated electrical tumble driers instead of washing lines!
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