Today saw the launch of the Government’s consultation on the future of coal in Britain.
This is a big issue because coal is the bad boy of climate change. Most of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today has come from burning the stuff and it accounts for about half of global emissions each year.
As far as we are concerned, climate change is the biggest threat to life on Earth and we are already seeing its impacts on our wildlife.
Warmer waters in the North Sea have led to a fall in the number of the sand eels eaten by many of our seabirds. This in turn has led to starvation in seabird colonies and a crash in populations.
The Government wants to keep a lid on climate change but also needs to keep the lights on and it believes coal will have to do some of the work.
In looking for an answer to this conundrum, it has pinned its hopes on carbon capture and storage or CCS, which traps and stores the carbon released by burning coal deep underground.
Under the Government’s proposals, new coal-fired power stations would only be built if they captured a ‘substantial proportion’ of their emissions. Once CCS technology was proven to work, they would have to upgrade and capture all their emissions.
There is a potential snag here, which you may have spotted. No one actually knows if CCS will work at a commercial scale. It should. In theory. But no one knows for sure. The Government wants four demonstration projects set up and is proceeding on the assumption these will have proved CCS works by 2020.
Let’s hope so.
In the meantime, the RSPB’s view is that requiring all new coal plants to have a limited amount of CCS is not enough.
Energy and Climate Change Secretary, Ed Milliband, has shown his willingness to face up to the coal problem by scrapping plans for 10 new coal plants with no CCS at all. The question now is whether he can finish the job.
First off, that means getting the demonstration programme right. Public money should be spent wisely.
If as planned, E.on's new Kingsnorth power station in Kent only captures a quarter of its emissions, then it will be pumping out twice as much carbon a year as the whole of Nepal, with its population of 30 million.
There is no excuse for that, CCS demo or no. Public money would be better spent on new plants which can capture all of their emissions from the start or on fitting CCS to plants which would be running anyway - reducing emissions rather than increasing them.
And if CCS isn't commercially viable by 2020? Our climate and our wildlife cannot be allowed to pay the price of such failure. Right now, the Government are planning to delay a decision on what to do with all the coal plants, which could by then be chugging away.
Climate change isn't a problem you can punt into the long grass. We need certainty now that, with or without CCS, emissions from coal will be ruled out by 2025.
In April, Mr Miliband told the Commons “the era of unabated coal is over,” which sounded like the start of a health care plan for the climate. Today's consultation shows us that such a plan is still possible, but there is a very real possibility we could end up with nothing more than a sticking plaster.