The great global coal rush: the fast track to irreversible disaster

If any credible environmentalist should be speaking the hardened language of priorities, one much-overlooked story surely deserves a lot more attention: what may soon be known as the new coal rush, and developments so at odds with the imperatives of climate change that they suggest a fast track towards irreversible disaster. The ubiquitous reduction of green politics to ethical consumerism means we’d probably rather carry on talking about cars, thermostats and lightbulbs. Faced with a resurgence that spans most of the planet, even the most righteous green activist could be forgiven for feeling powerless. No matter; what with skyrocketing gas prices and the fractious state of geopolitics, the stuff responsible for a quarter of the world’s CO2 emissions is on a roll, which surely represents our biggest environmental headache of all.
China, that rapidly advancing dystopia where rivers run black and miners are killed at the rate of 5,000 a year (witness this month’s coverage of the 180 trapped and probably killed in Shandong province, and the two brothers who dug their way out of a collapsed shaft near Beijing), is building an average of two coal-fired power stations a week, and in six years has doubled its annual coal production. India will construct more than 100 coal-fired plants over the next decade. Panicked by the possible policy repercussions of George Bush’s departure, US power corporations are desperately pushing ahead with plans for about 150 coal-fired stations and leaning hard on presidential candidates – as evidenced by Rudy Giuliani’s recent suggestion that the US should “increase our reliance on coal”.

Moreover, the new coal rush is truly global: in the next five years, 37 countries – among them plenty of Kyoto signatories – will build additional coal-fired capacity, while world coal production heads towards a peak that will apparently materialise in about 25 years’ time.

Talk to the advocates of CCS (crbon capture and storage) and you soon bump up against a weird kind of public relations that somehow combines evangelistic hype with all kinds of qualifications. They cite a handful of pilot schemes (which, just to soothe green hearts, often aim at using CO2 to release untapped oil and gas reserves), though the volumes involved are for now trifling. Even on the most optimistic projections, CCS won’t become viable on any convincing scale until well after 2030, and how much additional energy would be required to put the technique into worldwide practice remains a mystery. Whether it will be economically workable is another matter, not least for the countries whose room for manoeuvre is far less than that of the industrialised west. One UN study has estimated that obliging the coal-fired power industry to embrace CCS could push up the cost of the electricity it produces by anything between 40% and 90%.

The essential point is this. Carbon capture might have some appeal as a means of managing the emissions of a coal industry that could thereby be slowly scaled down, but it is currently being transformed into the justification for a hair-raising level of expansion..

Guardian