Environmental campaigners, Fossil Free North Yorkshire are calling on Ed Miliband, secretary of state for energy security and net zero, not to agree any extension of subsidies for tree burning power stations at Drax in Selby and Lynemouth in Northumberland.
Despite the recent high political and media profiles given to carbon capture and storage following the government’s £22bn pledge in subsidies to carbon capture projects, there is a feeling that both the previous and present governments have themselves been captured by the fossil fuel industry, which strongly supports carbon capture as it will prolong the demand for natural gas.
This is certainly the view of environmentalist George Monbiot who writing on X said: “Carbon capture and storage has failed time and time again. Labour has slashed reliable green programmes, to put vast sums of our money into a complete crock. The only possible explanation is lobbying by fossil fuel companies.”
Call for public funds to be diverted to renewables
In a letter to Miliband, who is also MP for Doncaster North, campaigners say they are “becoming increasingly concerned about the UK government’s plans to consider meeting the cost of extending the existing subsidy scheme (to Drax), from the end of 2027 to 2030. We join with the 41 groups from across Europe and the US who are ‘deeply concerned’ about the UK government’s plans to consider extending the subsidy scheme, and who have called on you to scrap plans to continue to pay billions in subsidies to the owners of Drax. These total more than £7bn since 2012 …”
The environmental campaigners believe the cost of new subsidies to UK bill payers could be anything up to £2.5bn a year. “This is money that will not be available to support a transition to genuinely renewable wind and solar power, which you are very supportive of. Continuing these subsidies would allow both power stations to keep burning trees and destroying forests at our expense for years to come.”
‘Refuse new subsidies for burning trees’
Drax is the largest CO2 emitter in the country and last year was responsible for four times more carbon emissions than the UK’s last remaining coal-fired plant (recently closed). Drax also agreed to pay a fine of £25mn after it was found to have failed to report accurate data on the type of material it burned at its power station.
Talk of introducing carbon capture and storage is no solution to the problem of CO2 emissions. The technology is controversial and the time taken for new trees to grow to replace those cleared for turning into wood pellets and subsequent burning for energy and absorb CO2 does not match the scale at which it is being emitted during burning.
Sustainable alternatives to wood-burning power stations
Carbon capture and storage have been around some 50 years. Many projects failed, and there were cost over-runs and massive subsidies. While today it is also backed by the Intergovernmental panel on Climate Change and the UK’s Climate Change Committee, former National Union of Mineworkers leader Arthur Scargill was a leading advocate of the technique.
Writing a chapter ‘If only …’ in Shafted: The Media, the Miners’ Strike and the Aftermath (published by the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom), former BBC correspondent Nick Jones reports that Scargill campaigned for “a new generation of coal-fired power stations designed to incorporate the latest carbon capture technology”. Jones goes on to point out that the pioneering work that Britain had done in the development of clean coal technology was one of the many casualties of the 1984/85 miners’ strike.
Lobbying by fossil fuel companies is working
The final blow came in the summer of 1992 when the then energy secretary Michael Heseltine announced the closure of 31 pits and continued support for the dash-for-gas, having dropped the ban on burning gas for generating electricity in 1990. After all, building gas stations was much cheaper and much more profitable, as Jones points out (page 136 If only).
As in the 1990s when the dash-for-gas won the energy race, today the lobbying of the fossil fuel companies is paying off. As Lindsey Gulden, a former ExxonMobil climate and data scientist told The Guardian: “CCS (carbon capture and storage) is technically complex and difficult for anyone but industry experts to fully understand. That means it can be easily spun to give cover to the oil industry as they attempt to navigate the growing public concern over climate change.”
This is why campaigners are calling on Miliband to refuse new subsidies for burning trees in our power stations, and to put in place a just transition scheme to replace Drax and Lynemouth power stations with sustainable alternatives.
CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO OUR CROWDFUNDER
HELP US BECOME STRONGER SO THAT WE CAN CONTINUE TO DELIVER POWERFUL CITIZEN JOURNALISM!
