Drastic changes?

In the UK’s Daily Mail, Christopher Booker dissects Britain's energy policy by looking at the changes planned at giant Drax power station in Yorkshire. Every day, Drax burns 36,000 tons of coal, brought to its vast site by 140 coal trains every week — and it supplies seven per cent of all the electricity used in Britain. Because it burns so much coal, Drax is the biggest single emitter in Britain of carbon dioxide (CO2), ‘the gas supposedly responsible for global warming’ says Booker.
There is, he writes, ‘no better symbol of madness than turning one of the biggest and most efficiently run coal-fired power stations into a world of eco-lunacy as it embarks on a £700 million switch away from burning coal in its six colossal boilers to devour millions of tons a year of wood chips instead’.

Most of these chips will come from trees felled in forests covering a staggering 4,600 square miles in the USA, from where they will be shipped 3,000 miles across the Atlantic to Britain. Campaigning groups, such as Friends of the Earth, scorn the idea that wood chips are  ‘carbon neutral’ or that felling millions of acres of American forests, to turn trees into chips and then transporting those chips thousands of miles to Yorkshire, will end up making any significant net reduction in ‘carbon’ emissions. Even then, before being pulverised into powder ready for use, the wood chips must be stored in giant purpose-built domes, where they need to be humidified in order to prevent spontaneous combustion — to which wood is 1,000 times more prone than coal. This has already given rise to disastrous fires in other power plants.

Unlike coal, biomass is considered ‘sustainable’, because it supposedly only returns back to the atmosphere the amount of CO2 it drew out of the air while the original tree it came from was growing.

The writer makes his case for coal here, citing that coal is still by far the cheapest means of creating electricity. But the Government is keen to meeting its own and the EU's targets for reducing Britain's "carbon emissions" and hence the change at Drax.

First, the UK Government wants to use a carbon tax to make burning fossil fuels such as coal so expensive that it will become prohibitive for power companies to use them. Second, the Government is determined to boost all those "carbon neutral" — ‘but currently much more expensive’ — means of making electricity, such as wind farms, nuclear power and burning biomass. “The result of this dog’s dinner of an energy policy is that, on the one hand we can look forward to ever-soaring energy bills, while on the other hand we will have crippling power cuts.”

He notes how Germany, which already has five times as many wind turbines as Britain, is now desperately building 20 new coal-fired stations in the hope of keeping its lights on. China, already the world’s largest CO2 emitter, is planning to build 363 more coal-fired power stations. India is ready to build 455 new coal-fired power stations…

Clearly, the world is getting polarised into two factions; one that looks at the cheap way of doing things, and the other at the long-term effects. True, expenses are getting out of control for everyone, from governments to the common man. But do you think expense should be the deciding factor?