The other day I got an email from my friend Matt asking if I was going to a mass protest at Kingsnorth, near the intriguingly-named Hoo Saint Weburgh in Kent:
“going to this? we have plastic blow up canoes”,
the email read.
With great sadness and not a little shame, I must confess I’m not there, as I’m out of the country at present. Otherwise I’d be hopping on a train from London to Strood (following the instructions here).
George Monbiot’s already there. He says he’s gone, “not because of polar bears… not because of butterflies or frogs or penguins or rainforests, much as I love them all. It is because everything I have fought for and that all campaigners for social justice have ever fought for – food, clean water, shelter, security – is jeopardised by climate change.”
So why exactly are all the cool kids flocking to Kingsnorth? And what’s with the blow-up canoes?
At the moment the government is sticking by a lunatic plan to build a new COAL-fired power station there. Britain’s first in 20 years.
Coal is only the most polluting way we know of producing electricity.
The new power station, if it goes ahead, will produce more CO2 each year than the whole of Ghana.
How does the government try to justify it?
…the rather boring fact is that the world is going to be burning lots of coal”
sneers energy minister Malcolm Wicks.
An argument that basically boils down to: “everyone else is doing it so why shouldn’t we?”
Well Malcolm, how can we even ask China and India to cut their carbon emissions (at the cost of significant development) if we’re not willing to cut our own? And should we assume you were just greenwashing last year, when you told the Fabian Society:
I have long been convinced of the intellectual case for early action on climate change…
The effects of global warming become extremely severe with a temperature rise of over 2 degrees Celsius, and as you see much of the world faces a rise of over 4 degrees if we fail to take decisive action.”
And your decisive action will be… supporting a brand-new emissions factory.
Counter-intuitive, you’ve got to admit. It goes against everything we know about the planet’s current, pressing problems.
NASA’s leading climate expert, Professor James Hansen says:
Kingsnorth is a terrible idea. One power plant with a lifetime of several decades will destroy the efforts of millions of citizens to reduce their emissions“
Hansen’s even written to Gordon Brown directly, asking him to ban new coal. So, who will our PM listen to: a NASA scientist… or, the lobbyists from E-ON, the world’s largest investor-owned power and gas company?
Currently the decision lies in the hands of John Hutton. You can write to him here, asking him to freeze the plans and conduct a full review of UK coal policy in light of the latest science on climate change. You won’t be alone. A parliamentary committee has already told the government that the plans are “failing to take adequate account of the environmental impact of coal”, and that “replacing old coal-fired power stations with new ones, rather than using alternative energy sources, locks Britain into a high level of emissions for many years to come”.
Like they say over at the climate camp,
coal might have made sense at the beginning of the industrial revolution but then so did child labour, slavery and woollen swimming trunks. Now we know burning coal is wrecking the climate.”
Oh yeah, I nearly forgot. The blow-up canoes. So this Saturday, thousands will gather at Kingsnorth to shut down the power station. Amongst other tactics, a ‘Great Rebel Raft Regatta’ will launch an armada of rafts on the river towards Kingsnorth. God speed those ships.
A response to Monbiot in this morning’s guardian… http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/08/nuclearpower.fossilfuels
It seems every time I read something about climate change I get even more confused about what we should do. Although I do want to know more about this “clean coal technology” and “carbon capture”…
It’s strange how there seems to be no consensus apart from “we need to do something” (and even that is far from universal, see the comments on this article: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article4474202.ece).
Incidentally, the Times article itself about green not being cool anymore is very compelling. In a time of credit crunch and overall global stress, maybe being green should just be about common sense.
Remember how cool mobile phones and emails were back in the days? Now most of us wouldn’t live without them but they are hardly the epitomy of cool. They are functional and using them just makes sense.
The fact that politicians are not riding the green wave for votes anymore might signal the end of the green fad but it just might also mean the beginning of a more widely spread realisation that being a greener and more conscientious consumer just makes sense.
i’m going to write up something about this a bit later, but suffice to say it was good fun, far better organised and slightly more hardcore than i expected. Plus there were some absoutely deranged hippies talking about how we’re all one with dragons, a communicative approach i dont think is perhaps the most productive in terms of getting the message across to those darn ‘normal’ people.
my favourite quote about all this is this one in the guardian:
Curious locals looked on as the action unfolded. Vic Mortley, 75, from Hoo village, who had served in the RAF, said: ‘I don’t want any part of the protest. We have lived with coal for 75 years. Are we aware of what coal is really doing – can we see the carbon emissions in the air?’
erm….
Great quote. Look forward to reading your post Matt.
M-A, I’m afraid Arthur Scargill isn’t the most objective commentator on coal, as his frankly idiotic closing argument would attest: “I challenge George Monbiot to test out which is the most dangerous fuel – coal or nuclear power. I am prepared to go into a room full of CO2 for two minutes, if he is prepared to go into a room full of radiation for two minutes.”
But if you’re interested in knowing more about “clean coal”, the Economist has a piece about carbon capture here:
http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displaystory.cfm?subjectid=8780295&story_id=11565676
from which the main point to note is:
“even the most optimistic proponents of carbon capture and storage doubt it will be a serious alternative much before 2020. And by then both the physical and the political climate may look rather different.”
and a longer piece from the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/business/30coal.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=todayspaper
[...] I’ve said before, coal is the most polluting way we know of producing electricity and it makes absolutely no sense [...]