Coal: Capturing the future

The Guardian, Monday 27 April 2009

Climate change needs the same kind of mass support that fired the Make Poverty History campaign, the energy secretary Ed Miliband said yesterday. He is right to try to provoke a sense of obligation in this generation to future generations, but although we can all play our part in reducing demand, only government can deliver the incentives and the structure for clean energy supplies.
Coal, globally available and flexible, will be a key energy source for the foreseeable future. Mr Miliband was merely accepting reality last week when he confirmed that it would continue to be part of the UK's energy mix. His victory came in devising a way to jump-start the commercial availability of clean coal technology by demanding that all new power stations are fitted with either pre- or post-combustion carbon capture and storage, and persuading the cabinet to adopt it. Mr Miliband has triumphed over the old non-interventionist energy policy which merely required all new coal-fired power stations to be ready for carbon capture technology, without taking steps towards its development. The new policy is also an acknowledgment of the weakness of relying on the market. The European emissions trading scheme, with its twin-track approach of capped emissions and tradable permits, was intended to price carbon. Instead, the last year has demonstrated that in hard times it cannot reliably deliver a price high enough to incentivise technological innovation. Right now, the market in emission permits looks about as viable as the market in sub-prime mortgages.
So Mr Miliband has pulled off a bold change of political direction, one that makes it more likely that Britain will meet its ambitious carbon reduction targets. If - and it is a big if - the science is viable and exportable, it might even help save the planet. With thoughtful proposals in the past few months from both the Lib Dems and the Conservatives, it appears that climate change is surviving the recession as a political issue, and might even survive a change of government. Which raises the question of whether, in this relatively benign political climate, Mr Miliband was bold enough.
Deep greenies will complain that the requirement for only a quarter of emissions to be captured in the first phase is too timid. They point out that a Kingsnorth of the future could still be pumping out up to 275m tonnes of polluting gases - half of all UK emissions. They protest that there is too much wriggle room, and that Mr Miliband will long since have left - if not the political stage then his Department of Energy and Climate Change - by the time the pilots are assessed, when it will be all too easy to abandon them as commercially unviable. It is also the case that by past dithering, the government has probably lost the chance of leading developments in clean coal technology. And it has procrastinated on domestic energy efficiency, the quickest and best-value route to cutting emissions by reducing demand. At least Alistair Darling's budget introduced a package of measures that will help the attempt to catch up.
Yet, given that he had to meet the challenge of technology that is still unproven on such a scale, Mr Miliband is to be congratulated for what he has achieved rather than berated for what he has not. Some big questions remain to be answered - sorting out, for example, who is going to pick up the still-uncertain bill for the pilot projects - but the government at last shows signs of taking a lead in the uphill task of persuading us all to take climate change seriously. For Mr Miliband's announcement was a success both in that it will make things happen, but also because it will contribute to an environment that encourages a wider sense of responsibility for climate change. Mr Miliband is making a reality of a department that puts energy and climate change into the same red box, and the shape of a real climate change policy is beginning to emerge.