Economy First: Britain Puts Decarbonisation On Hold
Allegra Stratton, The Guardian, 16 August 2010
The coalition is watering down a commitment to tough new environmental emissions standards, raising the possibility of dirty coal-fired power stations such as Kingsnorth going ahead.
Green groups are aghast that a flagship policy called for in opposition by both Lib Dems and Tories, and which they last year tried to force on the Labour government, will now not be implemented in the coalition’s first energy bill to be published this year.
Their criticism of the government’s commitment to green issues follows news last week that nature reserves could be sold off as countryside protection measures also bear the brunt of budget cuts in the Department for Environment.
Introducing a so-called “environmental performance standard” (EPS) for power companies would have restricted greenhouse gas emissions from coal and gas plants and encouraged companies wishing to build to use more efficient technology.
The introduction of an EPS was personally championed by David Cameron, George Osborne and Nick Clegg when in opposition; their opposition to Kingsnorth became something of a cause célèbre – and even features in the coalition agreement – but was opposed by energy companies and Tory backbenchers.
The chief executive at one coal-plant operating company warned that the UK’s renewable energy technology – which would be used to help new plants meet the target – was too undeveloped to make the EPS feasible.
Now government sources confirm they will not be bringing forward legislation in the autumn and will instead spend the summer working on “the larger picture”. They will open a consultation on the idea in the autumn with the results being presented to parliament as a white paper in the new year.
Green campaigners believe this is noncommittal for a policy both parts of the coalition said could be implemented immediately when in opposition.
They believe a delay in the introduction of the standard until next year – with a few years for the legislation to pass through the house and for it to be set up – raises the possibility of new coal-fire power stations slipping through the system.
Greenpeace energy campaigner, Joss Garman, said: “David Cameron made the introduction of new rules to stop the most polluting power stations one of his flagship green policies, and Nick Clegg helped ensure it was a key part of the coalition agreement.
“Both Lib Dem and Conservative MPs voted for the introduction of such a measure just a few months ago, and if they U-turn on this and fail to put this measure into their new energy law, how can they claim to be the greenest government ever?”
The energy company Peel Power has already come forward with a proposal in Scotland to build a largely unabated coal plant.
The government’s advisers, the Committee on Climate Change, said if the UK is to meet its climate targets it needs to decarbonise the whole power sector by 2030.
If the EPS is abandoned it would almost certainly reopen the debate about what the industry needs to change and encourage utilities to push forward with their original plans for a whole new fleet of dirty coal stations in the UK (the first to be built here for 30 years).
The consequences would be that the battle of Kingsnorth could be refought.
WUWT readers may recall the Dr. Jim Hansen went to Britain to defend vandals of this station. Story here. My reaction here.
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Common sense will prevail in the long run I hope. Maybe, just maybe, the powers that be have started to realise the implications of the green fiasco.
Didn’t England just say they were going to build 8 new nuclear power plants by 2018? Practically — My guess is all this carbon limiting nonsense, it’s all costing way too much, and they are broke.
Has anybody ever shown that the current levels of CO2 are too high and just not high enough? How would we know, since atmospheric CO2 levels have been far higher and far lower than they are today. I would like to see proof that we know what is the correct level of CO2 for earth. As far as I can recall, don’t greenhouses increase their CO2 so plants grown faster, using up the CO2? So why wouldn’t this be the case with more CO2 in the general atmosphere?
Except for it’s effect on the carbon credit market what’s not to like.
Bear in mind England has had far longer to fret about the problem than we have … And for that you can think Bush.
Coal is no longer as ‘dirty’ as it was and it’s a heck of a lot more efficient and effective that all the envirnoment and wildlife destroying wind turbines and tidal barriers that will change estuaries beyond recognition for ever.
Nail Greenpeace and their liars – they are the biggest threat to our society at present.
I was surprised when I heard this. It would be nice to think that some common sense is percolating through our leaders, but considering that Dave Cameron has backed down from most of his pre-election promises, this could simply be another….
Can we now call them the coal-ition?
Delingpole will be loving this – what has Huhne had to say??
A letter in the Sunday Times of 8th August is worth repeating:
I hate to agree with Jeremy Clarkson about anything, but on electric cars he is absolutely right (“Sizzling sandals, this is one hot eco-chariot”, last week). An electric car is only viable from an emissions viewpoint if the electricity that it uses is generated by renewable sources. In Britain this is not the case.
Unlike France, which has embraced nuclear power, Britain’s electricity is largely generated from fossil fuels. Worse, from 2015 we shall be suffering brownouts and blackouts, in the style of Heath’s three-day week, because the lunatics who ran our national asylum from 1997 to 2010 did not have the intelligence or moral courage to order a single power station of any kind, nuclear or fossil.
If we become dependent on electric cars we will have no personal transport as well as no light, no heat and no refrigeration. Citizens are well advised to fit solar panels on their roofs as soon as possible, not only to benefit from the generous feed-in tariff (which could easily be withdrawn by a cash-strapped government) but also to give themselves light and heat in the self-inflicted national power catastrophe that will hit us soon.
Professor Peter Wadhams,
department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics, Cambridge University
The post above should read “hear” not here, Doh!
The comments thread after this http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/aug/13/plan-sell-nature-reserves-austerity-countryside wailing article are a joy to behold.
Chickens/roost
We will ALL be paying for the massive “take” that happened via the “global financial collapse” for many years to come. The actual (real) environment and it’s problems will suffer because of the “environistas” narrow focus on the wrong problem.
When we were brought to the brink of economic meltdown did any of the greens protest much? Yet any mention of “dirty coal” finds them scurrying out of their burrows, wringing their fists and squealing that they have been betrayed.
Why (why?, why?, why?, why? and yet again why?) are they so incapable of joined up thinking? How did their newspaper arrive and thrive? How did their computer? How did their Internet access?
Dumb. If only they were only dumb. But no, they are dumb and have too much time on their hands – courtesy, again, of an excess of electricity – so they may continually clog up the gears of progress with their revisionist claptrap.
Sorry, (not just for the rant) but they cannot have their cake and eat it. Either shiver in a cave with zero luxuries and long, dark nights or come into the light and work (yuk) toward a brighter future with no worries about a trace gas that sustains all life.
This can’t be right!? ….You mean we haven’t got our backs against the wall of China after all?
London Free….
http://libertygibbert.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/the-china-syndrome/
Ahh- from the pen O’ the Scottish poet Mr. Robert Burns ““The best laid schemes o’ mice and men Gang aft a-gley; And leave us naught but grief and pain For promised joy” .
The undermining (sic) of coal as an energy source always owed more Thatcher wishing to defeat left wing unions such as the miners NUM, than with any green policy. One of the most left wing and green politicians we have ( Tony Benn) has always opposed the closing of mines and the construction of nuclear power stations Why spend billions on nuclear power, when we have huge source of energy at our feet? Coal can be clean,we do not have to rely on dodgy middle eastern regimes and it provides work for our own people. Dig in folks!
“The consequences would be that the battle of Kingsnorth could be refought.”
They torture the language nearly as much as the data.
Well the fastest way to prove the economical efficacy of a coal or carbon free, renewable alternative free clean green energy system; is to simply put a fence around it, and then force it to duplicate itself; using only the energy that the system produces; and of course with availability of all the raw material resources of the universe in their natural state, and location, (which too must be obtained only with the expenditure of energy from your alternative plant.)
Then we’ll see who actually can prosper without coal or petroleum and natural gas. I have of late told vendors at our local street organic food fairs on saturday mornings, that I do not eat organic foods, because it contains carbon. You’d be surprised how many organic farm vendors have ensured me that their produce is certified carbon free.
Due to the balmy heatwave recently the government and some crazed Warmists have forgotten how cold winter can be and the 40,000 excess deaths this past winter in the UK.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8446523.stm
http://news.stv.tv/scotland/west-central/166745-kinbuck-residents-suffer-power-outage/
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10619380&pnum=2
Thank god that common sense has began to seep back into governance in Britain.
But reading your reference to Jim Hansen in you aricle above Anthony, makes it clear to me that he is an activist first and a scientist last. It explains to me all his actions in the ‘climategate’ saga. As for the jurist’s findings in the article referred to below, justifying vandalism as a defence for what is essentially a religious fervour – words fail me! This in Britain – the home of justice.
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/climate/kingsnorth-trial-breaking-news-verdict-20080910
Doug
Lady Life Grows says: “If it were about carbon or pollution or the environment, there would be thousands of studies on mammals and carbon dioxide levels–on intact creatures. There aren’t.”
There are a few here:
http://co2science.org/subject/m/mammals.php
But you seem to be correct. And your comments are interesting.
You made me wonder if the small boxes I’ve built as bird houses do have higher internal CO2 levels during the incubation period. My big old cottonwood trees have hollows in them that would act the same. When one of the trees falls or has to be cut down I cut that section with the hollow nest site out and hoist it back up in another tree and wire it in-place. I can’t get them very high so the effectiveness of this is unknown. Those big trees are an environmental treasure that take many years to develop.
John Peter says:
August 16, 2010 at 10:27 am
I have left a space in my small outhouse containing my gas boiler for a diesel stand-by power generator in the certain expectation that within the next five years we would be on a three day week for electricity here in Scotland.
John Peter:
I think your use of “outhouse” means an auxiliary building near your house.
You should be aware that the American colloquial use of “outhouse” implies some place where Al Gore puts his excrement. (In which case, there may be enough to fuel the “waste Beetle/VW” mentioned a week ago in WUWT.) Thanks for the inadvertent, but excellent language humor!
Reading the Guardian comments I’m not sure whether to laugh or weep. I always suspected that the professional environmentalist (as opposed to those of us who just simply care about nature) was slightly demented, if not worse. This collection of self-flagellating whinges only serves to confirm it.
Is there no Guardian reader who understands that a) if it’s a choice between cutting expenditure on the feel-good add-ons and the country going bankrupt then there really isn’t a choice, and b) there is nothing in the plans being proposed that necessarily makes any of the enviro-nuts’ nightmares come true.
If they’re that worried why don’t they go out and do something themselves? Most of them are not short of a quid or two.
Re- Scotland’s aspirations. This is the stuff peddled by our current administration, followed party-wide: Scotland”s Climate Change Declaration http://climatechange.sustainable-scotland.net/index.asp?…
And for no fee this group will be happy to meet for screenings of ‘inconvenient truths’ -after licensing.
Lunatics never had it so good ….
Alan Simpson not from Friends of the Earth says:
August 16, 2010 at 9:36 am
The politicians are slowly backing away, there are plans to privatise, ( sell off ), the Met Office and most of our nature reserves,
I’d like the Tory whelps to take their grubby mitts off the nature reserves and return the taxes they are levying on me that they said were going to pay for policies they are not now going to implement.
Thieves.
Max, thanks for clearing up that “outhouse” reference.
Good to hear the power plants are proceeding. Decarbonization. What rubbish. CO2 is harmless and in fact, it and a little warming are good for us and for all life.
I’m with Lady Life Grows – let’s let life move forward. I hope the mass of humanity starts seeing the warmistas as the Malthusian, nihilistic, enemies of society that they are.
Whilst I sincerely hope that this is indeed the first sign of a change of heart, I’m afraid many of the comments here very strongly remind me of the old saying about counting unhatched eggs.
One story in the Grauniad with a few choice quotes from Greenpiss and the Committee on Climate Change has my bullshit meter flashing at danger levels.
Don’t forget that both Cameron and Clegg don’t have a principle anywhere in their bodies and both have (through their wives) a direct financial interest in BigWind.
Don’t forget that Secretary of State for Energy & Climate Change is Buff Huhne. As wild eyed a greenie true believer as you could wish for.
The Grauniad says “Now government sources confirm they will not be bringing forward legislation in the autumn and will instead spend the summer working on “the larger picture”. They will open a consultation on the idea in the autumn with the results being presented to parliament as a white paper in the new year.”
Let’s just wait to see what “the larger picture” looks like before we start breaking out the champagne. Or even the Newcastle Brown Ale.
As the coalition is brought face to face with the financial reality engendered by thirteen years of left wing pandering to the green lobbyists, common sense is forced upon them. The frivolity funding cupboard is bare and the colder winters that could now ensue might decimate the pensioners whose interest on savings is currently being appropriated from their income by means of a deliberately low bank rate in order to save the ruined economy.
The Office of Renewable Energy Deployment and the Department of Energy and Climate Change would seem at this time to be ideal candidates for the axe along with the incredibly stupid Chris Huhne who is convinced that NUCLEAR is not a low carbon alternative and should therefore not qualify for the liberal assistance lavished on wind and tide.
Here in “rights before responsibilities” Scotland, the never – never land of Alex Salmond, the lights will undoubtedly be the first to go out and that quite soon.
At this very moment wind is providing 0.1% of total consumption whilst the French interconnector is sending UK 5.7% to help meet our total demand.