Though Cowards Flinch

I was reading with interest the comments of one David Sassoon on the subject of ‘the coal train to nowhere’. Mr. Sassoon’s problem is with the powerful coal lobby in Washington, and the recent progress made in getting the government there to sign up environmental initiatives in the face of coal lobby opposition.

Throughout the article a simplistic theme recurs. Coal-fired power stations = bad.

Now, to a point, I agree. It is shameful that the DoD in the USA is looking seriously at propagating the expensive and extremely pollutive process of changing coal into Jet fuel. It is also pretty terrible that the majority of Americans get their energy from coal-fired power stations. These are among the most dirty sources of electricity in terms of CO2 and SO2.

Yet before we begin to dismiss coal entirely, we should take a closer look.

New technologies are arriving, such as carbon sequestration, that will help to greatly reduce the environmental effect of coal burning power stations. Moreover, whether or not one believes that the global Hubbert peak is imminent, the global demand for oil and natural gas is still rapidly expanding.

The world consumes approximately 84 million barrels of oil per day – and demand is fast increasing. Not adjusting the estimate to take into account the exponentially increasing demand of China, India, Eastern Europe and other areas where economies are expanding, the current supply of crude oil will run out somewhere around 2039.

I imagine, come winter that year, environmentalists won’t be protesting too much about coal-fired power stations.

Perhaps this is too much for committed environmentalists to stomach, but I think we’re going to hear a lot more about ‘clean’ coal and other similar projects over the coming years, despite the decision of the US government to pull funding from the PFI deal on FutureGen, which would have been the first working model power station providing clean coal.

On this issue, a less triumphalist tone is most certainly required from environmentalists such as Sassoon.