By Roger Helmer MEP.
The World Wildlife Fund has just sent me a piece of coal. It's a rather small piece of coal, in a little translucent paper sachet, and it's fixed to a card with a message. The card is cleverly printed to look as if it's carrying dirty, sooty fingerprints, although in fact it's ink. The message is simple, and short enough to quote:
"Today more than sixty new coal-fired power plants are being built or planned across Europe. These investments push our climate goals out of reach. What will you do? Introduce CO2 standards for new power plants in the Industrial Emissions Directive. Get dirty coal under control!"
Maybe they didn't know, or didn't care, that China is building a new coal-fired power station every week, with India not far behind. We hear a lot about China's green technology developments. Those Chinese know a good marketing opportunity when they see one -- and they know how to exploit Western angst and Western subsidies, under the UN's Clean Development Mechanism. But they also know that economic growth requires electricity. Lots of it. And they know that the only way to guarantee reliable baseload generating capacity is with mainstream technologies like coal and nuclear.
What the Chinese are doing makes eminent good sense in economic terms. And given the current collapse of the Great Carbon Myth, following the IPCC and CRU revelations, it makes pretty good sense in environmental terms too.
But however you view the climate debate, neither you nor I nor the WWF is going to stop the Chinese, so the WWF solution -- that we cripple European economies in our Green Crusade -- is fairly irrelevant.
And it's not just the Chinese. Just this morning I got news that Alcoa of Australia, the major aluminium smelter, has just signed an energy supply deal with Loy Yang Power, a generating operation fired by brown coal, to provide baseload power for Alcoa's Point Henry and Portland smelters. These contracts start in 2014/16 -- and run to 2036. “Energy security in the form of long-term, base-load agreements is vital to aluminium smelters and the jobs they provide worldwide,” says Mr. Alan Cransberg, Managing Director of Alcoa of Australia. So it seems that the Aussies' brief and ill-advised flirtation with green policies and carbon taxes is well and truly over -- and a good thing too. You can't run an aluminium smelter with the pathetic, intermittent trickle of expensive electricity from a few wind-turbines.
So to reply to WWF: What will I do? Well the first thing I'll do is to burn the piece of coal. I have a log-burner at home, but it's perfectly capable of dealing with a small amount of coal. I'll throw in the paper sachet, as well, and call it waste incineration with energy recovery. And the next thing I'll do is to keep right on campaigning for common sense in the climate debate; campaigning on energy security in the UK; and campaigning for coal and nuclear.
I was impressed to hear that in his big speech at Brighton at the weekend, David Cameron mentioned the threat of an energy crunch, and of the lights going out, during the early years of the new Conservative government which we hope to see elected shortly. That can only mean gas (in the short term) and coal and nuclear in the medium term. Let's get building. And mining coal.
