On 14 February David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband put aside their differences in order to focus on something they could all agree on: getting rid of unabated coal from our energy system. This level of agreement is almost unprecedented in the run-up to a general election and demonstrates the extent to which action to stop coal emissions has become a no-brainer.
The move from the three party leaders followed a groundswell of public concern over the threat posed by coal to our efforts to tackle climate change. Last October 50 Greenpeace volunteers stopped a train laden with coal on its way to one of Europe’s most polluting coal plants – EDF-owned Cottam power station in Nottinghamshire – and proceeded to unload the cargo. Admittedly, this sort of activity isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but its significance lies in the fact that so many ordinary people – retired teachers, beauticians, PhD students – were willing to put their liberty on the line to call for an end to coal pollution.
Since then, thousands of people have added their names to a Greenpeace petition calling on the leaders of the three main parties to eliminate coal emissions by the early 2020s, and high-profile organisations including Christian Aid and the Women’s Institute have also called for a phase-out.
The last time the UK saw such a broad alliance of groups calling for an end to coal pollution was the Kingsnorth campaign. Then, a successful campaign relying on bold, non-violent direct action and large-scale civil society mobilisation forced Eon to ditch plans to build the first new coal plant in a generation. In the aftermath of that campaign victory, the then-Labour government decided to ban new coal without carbon capture and storage – a turning point for UK energy policy.
Now it is happening again, only this time the shift in position required from the main political parties is nowhere near as dramatic. There is already a consensus that our ageing coal power stations need to be phased out. In fact, the government’s own projections claim that unabated coal will be off the system by the mid-2020s due to a rising carbon price and the costs of complying with the Industrial Emissions Directive.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you own a coal power station) these measures have lost, or are about to lose, much of their efficacy thanks to heavy lobbying from the industry. For example, officials at the Department of Energy and Climate Change are convinced that the carbon price alone will somehow be enough to drive coal off the system. Yet when Greenpeace recently met with UK coal plant operators, the general view was that the carbon price floor is unlikely to increase post-2020. In fact, it is much more likely to be scrapped altogether. But even a long-term freeze at the current level would still be a significant victory for the coal industry and other interest groups – such as the Energy Intensive Users Group – which has lobbied for the chancellor’s carbon tax to be watered down or scrapped.
At the same time, new European Union measures to limit toxic emissions from large industrial plants have come under attack from the industry. In order to improve the profitability of keeping plant open for longer, the UK Coal Forum has been openly calling for the limits set years ago for toxic pollutants such as NOx and SO2 not to be tightened as part of an EU review of standards for clean-up technology. They have also called on the Treasury to freeze the carbon price floor and lobbied for coal to receive subsidies through the capacity market.
This clearly makes sense if all you are worried about is your bottom line, but the implications for people’s health and for the climate are huge. A recent study by the Health and Environment Alliance estimated that air pollution from the UK’s coal power stations caused 1,600 premature deaths a year and cost the taxpayer up to £3.1 billion in health impacts.
The Committee on Climate Change has said that if the UK is to decarbonise at least cost, “there can be no role for conventional coal generation in the UK beyond the early 2020s”. This was echoed by a recent report by the Global Commission on the Economy and the Climate, jointly commissioned by the UK government, which called for affluent countries to “accelerate early retirement of existing unabated capacity”.
This imperative is likely to be one of the factors that led Cameron, Clegg and Miliband to make their joint pledge on ending dirty coal.
One way or another, the UK’s unabated coal power stations will be taken off the system over the next few years. The only question is, by when? There are very good reasons to stick to the advice of the Committee on Climate Change and take coal emissions out of our energy system by the early 2020s. In the coming months, we will be making this case to our political leaders.
Lawrence Carter, energy campaigner, Greenpeace UK