Yesterday, my colleague Jude Lane posted a blog on the latest hen harrier shot and found dead on a grouse moor. Many thanks to those of you that contacted me directly to share your outrage and to offer support. I shall return to this later in the week.
Today, I want to write about another conservation headcase (with serious economic and social consequences): climate change.
Remember the drama of Copenhagen? Billed as our last chance to save the planet, but ending in spectacular disappointment. Since then, world leaders have slowly been re-building consensus, towards a new global deal on climate by 2015. Their most recent meeting closed yesterday in Qatar with only the smallest amount of progress to report (see here and here).
We still remain hopeful, however, that we will get that elusive deal – and we’ll be doing everything we can to achieve this. Why? Because the RSPB’s mission is to save nature, and we simply can’t achieve this unless climate change can be kept to within safe limits.
Yet, whilst countries were doing their best to make progress in Doha last week, the Chancellor announced a new gas strategy for the UK that brings us to the brink of pulling apart our own climate targets.
The Strategy suggests that we could see up to 40 new gas power stations being built with support from Government by 2030. The Committee on Climate Change has long advised that the UK needs to effectively have zero-carbon electricity by 2030 if we are to meet our climate targets. With the publication of the gas strategy, this advice has effectively been snubbed, and the CEO of the Committee has responded accordingly, saying that the strategy “would not be economically sensible" and was "completely incompatible" with our climate targets.
Worse, the detail of the strategy suggests that post-2020, the Government is effectively ready to walk away from renewable energy, and is even setting out conditions under which our targets could be reduced. Have a look at this graph from the strategy.
Post 2020, growth in renewable energy slows and comes to a halt by the end of the decade.
I think we will remember 2012 as a turning point in our acceptance of anthropogenic climate change and the threat it poses to humans and wildlife. The extreme weather we’ve seen here and across the world is a taste of what’s to come. The reality is we have to break our addiction to fossil fuels – including gas – and we have to do it by 2030. Lets hope that this Government wakes up to this fact fast and begins taking its commitment to avoid dangerous climate change seriously.
One factor that has not been mentioned in this issue of using gas produced from "fracking" to generate power at a number of new CCGT (Combined Cycle Gas Turbine) power stations is that of processes currently being developed and trialed for decarbonising (or extracting the carbon dioxide) from the flue (exhaust) gas. Such technology should be ideally suited to these types of new power stations. Of course it will represent an additional cost to the running of the power station and there does need to be a "sink" for disposal of the CO2 but both of these issues ought to be solveable. So come on the Dept of Energy and Climate Change let's have some "outside the box" thinking on this issue and may be we can have both our gas powered stations but at the same time meet out climate change targets
Not as simple as conservationists make out,if the U K reduces emissions to help prevent climate change then it hardly makes any difference globally unless India,China and U S A do the same and they show absolutely no enthusiasm to do so,in fact probably the opposite.
It may be O K for those earning salaries of £50,000 to £100,000 or even more a year to drive thousands of miles often in inefficient polluting vehicles to preach about not going for cheap gas fuel in houses but what about those on low incomes,pensioners etc with no car whose carbon footprint even with use of gas is far less than those preaching,how fair is that.
We also have to keep our industry competitive and if other countries using gas fuel then we are forced to take a similar attitude.