Another round in the carbon wars. If you make money by producing coal, then the chances are that you’d like to keep doing so. Hence The Warsaw Communiqué (full PDF). I think its good that the World Coal folks feel the need to do some PR and push the idea of “clean coal”; they must be a little bit worried that someone is going to try to lean on them, so they’ll get their words in. But, many of their words are silly. Not that many of them are wrong; just pointless.
They start playing nicely:
Recognising international consensus on the need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, in conformity with the objectives of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
so while they don’t say they accept the science themselves, they do at least know that other people do. Its downhill from there, though:
Recognising the need to address the problem of energy poverty
That’s not wrong, of course, its just a lead in to:
Recalling that the International Energy Agency has estimated that half of the on-grid electricity needed to provide “sustainable energy access for all” will come from coal
And now they’ve got to where they want to be: burning lots of coal. Now it gets more confusing:
We therefore bring to the attention of policy-makers the fact that high-efficiency low-emissions coal combustion technologies are commercially available…
It isn’t clear to me what they’re referring to here. Nor is it clear why they think their coal-burning customers are so stupid as to continue to burn coal inefficiently. Unless of course the cost of upgrading their tech would be more than the cost of the extra coal they’re burning, in which case its perfectly obvious. And won’t be solved by these words.
And this efficiency is apparently a
necessary milestone towards the deployment of carbon capture utilisation and storage technologies once demonstrated and commercialised.
But CCS isn’t commercial, and won’t be, at anything believeable as a carbon price. These people aren’t stupid (or if they are, they’ve got plenty of clever people available to think for them) so they know that.
So, its all a bit of a waste of time, except for the PR element. The bits that make sense (increasing efficiency) will happen anyway. The bits that don’t (CCS) won’t.
Stop making sense
Speaking of not making sense, Lord Donoughue, who appears to be someone’s pet septic in the Lords, asked the govt about the potential impact on the United Kingdom and global economies of any future extensive glaciation. This is an utter waste of everyone’s time. Because, of course, all that happens is that this gets bounced to the appropriate science institute – in the case BAS – who tell the noble but stupid Lord exactly what they could have learnt for themselves. I won’t spoil the excitement by telling you what the answer is.
* Krugman part 2: you can get pretty far just by regulating coal if you prefer an alternative view, via Brian.