More Climate Scandal
£400 million of our money, the UK’s contribution to the World Bank’s clean development fund, looks set to be spent instead on a new generation of coal fired power plants:
Bloody hell. I knew the World Bank were a pretty evil monolith of Orwellianism, a pretty powerful driver of all that is bad in the world, but this to me is a whole new level of obfuscation. How coal power could ever be described as clean is beyond me.
Even taking the extreme view that climate change is all a total load of nonsense, this is still DEAD technology. Utterly useless. More efficient/cleaner ways of burning coal, in this day and age, make about as much sense to me as more efficient ways of quarrying stone for the purpose of henge building, or finding ways to make traction engines slightly less polluting.
Like the transistor-based computers, there is no future whatsoever for coal as a power generator…even without the fearsome prospect of climate change.
Why?
1) Coal burning is grossly inneficient in many ways. Transport costs, extraction costs, extraction risks etc. It is getting more expensive and more inneficient. That’s without taking into account that the process of burning coal to gain power is already inherently inneficient as one must burn the coal to heat the water which is then converted to steam which is forced through pipes to create the pressure and thus force needed to turn the turbines which make the power. Wind power, on the other hand, uses wind to turn the turbines. I hope you see my point.
2) Coal is a finite resource. This is something the climate change sceptics/deniers/scientific pygmies/whatever you want to call them have (although with some help from climate change campaigners themselves) managed to pretty much remove from the sphere of public debate.
There is NO CHOICE but to give up coal and oil as power sources. Whether near or far away, peak oil either is, or will be, happening, and then climate change being true or not doesn’t really matter…as we can’t burn what we have already burned.
Climate change is, in my view, very real and very dangerous, but even if not it is simply a rallying cry for making changes that NEED TO BE MADE ANYWAY. Those who say we can keep on burning coal/oil/whatever are either lying to promote their own financial agenda or complete idiots. Sorry, but I don’t see a middle ground there.
3) Coal is shitty, dirty and polluting. With all due respect to those (among my probably imaginary audience) who work with the stuff or mine it or whatever, but it’s not an ideal substance to be breathing in the burn remnants of. London is already well in breach of acceptable air pollution levels, last thing we need is a new generation of coal power plants. Those nimbys who have a problem with wind farms should be made to live beside a coal fired plant for a month. If they still think wind farms are a blight on the landscape after that then fair enough (well, actually I’d probably advocate chicking them in that power plant but that’s rather evil so I won’t).
The Coen brothers have lampooned this fallacy very well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFJVbdiMgfM&eurl=http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/the-coen-brothers-do-clean-coal/&feature=player_embedded
The whole idea of clean coal reminds me of Andy Dufresne’s great speech to red in ‘Shawshank Redemption’:
“Clean coal? The whole thing’s a myth. A chimera. A figment of my imagination. Second cousin to Harvey the Rabbit. There is no clean coal. I made it up.”
Might as well chuck in Fred Pearce’s Guardian blog on the subject while I’m here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/feb/26/greenwash-clean-coal
