Like it or not, coal is vital to Asia’s growth

Environmentalist thinkers and activists always feared international dependence in energy – particularly dependence on oil in the Middle East. From the green point of view, energy should always be local. However, the local nature of coal for countries like India and China is not seen as a benefit. Yet when accused of double standards, environmentalists point to the heavy carbon emissions that use of coal leads to. Those emissions are an incontestable fact. But what certainly can be contested is greens’ dismissal of a technology that could make a difference to the way we use coal: carbon capture and storage (CCS). CCS is an approach which attempts to mitigate global warming by capturing the CO2 that is emitted from power plants and subsequently storing it instead of allowing it to be released into the atmosphere.
For all their mantra-like invocations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, greens rarely mention the fact that even the IPCC favours CCS: it names CCS as one of its ‘key technologies’ for mitigating CO2 emissions (3). It’s true that CCS is in its infancy, and it’s also true that so far, capitalism is, as usual, not rushing to make the investments that will be required to test and then apply an innovation like CCS. But solar and wind power are also in need of major research and technological advance if ever they are to be a useful and efficient part of the world’s energy portfolio: scientists in Japan and China, which are particularly expert in photovoltaic panels, will agree that really competitive devices are 20 or 30 years away. So why, if greens believe the price and viability of renewable energy will come right in time, do so many of them hold a means of dealing with emissions, such as CCS, to be a non-starter?

The answer is that, behind their hostility to coal and CCS, is something much bigger than the important issues of carbon emissions and the need to make the right, dispassionate choice of technique in energy supply. Environmentalists are selective in their optimism because they want to repudiate the twentieth century, not just the coal that, in large part, made that century happen. A little like Lady Macbeth, they guiltily want the dark spots of Western affluence removed. They have premonitions of doom, and are disillusioned with economic growth at home. As a result, they stigmatise burgeoning development in Asia, and especially the coal that fuels it, as a catastrophe.

British journalist and author John Harris makes this Grimperialist vision of the East clear enough. Coal, he says, is on a roll; while India will construct more than 100 coal-fired plants over the next decade, China is building an average of two coal-fired power stations a week. In the process, Harris says, China has become ‘that rapidly advancing dystopia where rivers run black’ (4). Not to be outdone, green activist and writer Jeremy Leggett, in another lengthy polemic against coal, used the occasion of the APEC summit to insist that most of the remaining coal in the world ‘has to stay in the ground if we are to avoid climate catastrophe’. He adds that it would be ‘surprising’ if the APEC summit offered any hope of the world ‘kicking the coal habit’ (5).

But what could be a more destructive and indeed dystopian addiction than to forbid China and countries like it from using coal, one of their principal indigenous means to develop?

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