Labour supported Arthur Scargill's determination to keep pits open. The party prevented Tony Blair from building any nuclear power stations, instead tipping subsidies into wind, which merely encouraged Britain's dependency on coal, now at 38% and rising. Global coal consumption is at its highest level since 2006, and mocks all attempts at emissions discipline.
The past two decades of a "rush to renewables" remains a conundrum of modern government. Wind clearly generates electricity, which is good, but not much – and at a cost that has led to an extraordinary shift in wealth from poor to rich in public finance. In most of Europe, wind power has driven up fuel poverty and made dozens of landowners multimillionaires. A KPMG report to government in 2011 suggested that a similar cut in emissions could be achieved by switching to gas and nuclear, at a reported saving of £34bn.
The prospect of a bandwagon loaded with subsidy (wind) crashing head-on into another loaded with profit (oil) has not been conducive to calm debate. All the two sides can agree on is paranoia about nuclear. After Japan's Fukushima disaster in 2011, in which no one died, Germany was so panicked that it closed all its nuclear sites. This in turn meant frantic investment in German coal and lignite – 10 new plants are said to be opening – and a surge in Polish coal output. The latter may spend ¤20bn a year on renewables subsidies, involving an 80% rise in real energy prices since 2000, but the need to back these up with conventional capacity means that the chief beneficiary of Fukushima was coal. Germany's carbon emissions are rising by between 5% and 7% a year.
Meanwhile, the continued identification of nuclear power with nuclear weapons – and now with the prospect of a terrorist dirty bomb – has long underpinned the left's opposition to it. Anyone involved should take an icepack and sit down to read Wade Allison's Radiation and Reason as an antidote. There have been few such potent alliances as the anti-nuclear lobby, Big Carbon and the Saudis driving up the cost of nuclear. The beneficiary, again, has been coal.
Anyone who dares talk or write on this subject is scrutinised for tribal loyalties. Where is he coming from? Who must be paying him? I must have spent hundreds of man-hours attempting to keep abreast of the debate, struggling to remain loyal to planet reason.
All I have concluded is that most sensible people – though not all – think the climate is changing, and that the precautionary principle suggests concerted action to combat it. But the "renewables ascendancy", culminating in the hysteria of the first International Panel on Climate Change report, was a disaster. It saw any carbon combustion or nuclear reaction as equally evil, and any sun, wind or wave power as equally good – however costly. Pleas from energy experts such as Oxford's Dieter Helm for economic literacy fell on deaf ears. "Announcing a policy does not solve a problem," he said of the IPCC report in despair.
For its part, coal is treated as a curiously tolerable rogue. Soaring Chinese and Indian consumption is taken as an inevitable consequence of poverty. British politicians, infatuated after visiting China, rarely mention that the basis of this growth is vast supplies of coal. The Chinese used 1.5bn tonnes of the stuff in 2000, and now use more than 4bn. This utterly swamps any western attempt at mitigation. The death rate among Chinese miners may be down from about 6,000 a year at the turn of the century, but is still beyond 1,000 a year.
In the great debate over mitigation and adaptation, the adaptors now appear to be winning. Last March's report from the IPCC marked a dramatic shift. Given that the campaign to reduce emissions has largely failed, money is now better spent on softening the impacts of global warming and helping those directly affected. As one of the few heroes of the debate, James Lovelock points out in his book Revenge of Gaia, the world's systems are "adjustable for whatever is the current environment, adaptable to what forms of life it carries."
The Turkish disaster reminds us not just of the human cost of coal, but also the cost of hysteria-led policy. Gas is a carbon-based source of energy but can be twice or three times less polluting than coal – and does not require hundreds of people to die each year extracting it. The "dash for gas" has made America the only big country to actually reduce emissions since Kyoto.
I am more persuaded by the fact of global warming than by it being a long-term existential threat to life on Earth. I am more of an adaptor. Even so, it makes sense to turn to fuels which are less polluting and dangerous to get than coal, while always seeking to innovate and curb energy use.
But if I am wrong and warming is indeed a threat to survival, then mitigation becomes urgent. In which case a dash to gas and nuclear is vital. Above all, we should avoid spending money on intermittent renewables. They may appear to be a solution. In fact, they create an ever-rising need for deadly coal as a supplement.
Source: The Guardian | 15 May 2014
