For five years, with increasing vehemence, this column has been warning that Britain will soon face an unprecedented energy crisis through our failure to replace ageing power stations with enough new ones to meet our electricity needs. Last week, with the National Grid's warning that blackouts could begin this winter, this wholly predictable crisis at last made front-page news - which was why the most significant Labour conference speech was that made by our Business (and energy) Secretary, John Hutton. Alone among senior politicians, Mr Hutton has woken up to the gravity of this threat to our economic survival and "our sovereignty as a nation". Aware that we can no longer look to natural gas to save us, he emphasised that our only hope is to get on with building new nuclear and coal-fired power stations as fast as possible - "no coal plus no nuclear equals no lights, no power, no future", as he put it. Hence, two days later, his announcement that British Energy is to be sold to France's EDF, as our best hope of building new nuclear reactors. But even EDF cannot promise that the first of its four planned reactors will be supplying power before 2020, some five years after we are due to lose 40 per cent of the generating capacity we need to meet current peak demand. Hence Mr Hutton's repeated insistence that we urgently need a new generation of coal-fired power stations. But, as we saw from the recent court victory of the Greenpeace protesters at Kingsnorth, these are hated by the immensely powerful "green" lobby as much as nuclear power. Just what Mr Hutton is up against was highlighted by the ultimatum from Lord Smith (the former Cabinet minister Chris Smith), who has now, bizarrely, been put in charge of the Environment Agency. No new coal-fired power stations can be allowed, insists Smith, unless they are fitted with full "carbon capture and storage". This is the extraordinary notion that all the CO2 emitted from burning coal can be piped off and buried in holes in the ground. The greens babble on about "carbon capture" as if it were a perfectly reasonable thing to ask. But the hard fact is that this "green dream" is still only at the experimental stage, and all evidence suggests that in practical terms the experiment isn't working. According to a McKinsey report given last week to the European Commission, the capital cost of a coal-fired power station fitted with "carbon capture" will be two or three times that of a conventional coal-fired plant. Its operating costs could then also be double, not least because they will need to burn up to 60 per cent more coal to generate the same electricity. At present, to generate 35 per cent of our power, we burn 52 million tons of coal, 22 million tons of which we have to import from Russia. To fit our power stations with "carbon capture" we would need to build at least four more large coal-fired plants just to make up the power diverted into disposing of CO2. And to do that we would have to become even more dependent on imports from such unreliable sources as Russia, at a time when coal prices are already soaring. Last week I said that the astronomic costs we are threatened with by the EU's emissions trading scheme "betoken the economics of the madhouse". Now, for yet another wholly unproven "green dream", we are being asked to more than double the cost of coal-fired electricity yet again. As Mr Hutton implied, we will soon have to choose between these fantasies and our survival as a nation. The Great Moonbat is the one who's spreading 'misinformation' about asbestos It is not often one journalist accuses another of killing his readers, but that was one of the charges levelled against me in an extraordinary tirade last week by The Guardian's environmental columnist George Monbiot. Under the heading "The patron saint of charlatans is again spreading dangerous misinformation", Mr Monbiot centred his vitriolic attack on two regular themes of this column. The first of these is that no risk is posed to human health by exposure to cement bonded with white asbestos (90 per cent of all asbestos products in the world). Wherever Mr Monbiot got his information, his explosion of self-righteousness on this issue was massively ill-informed. According to his blog, he based his case on five scientific studies (which he cannot have read, since in several cases he got the names of the authors wrong). Had he done his homework, he would have seen that none of these old papers were concerned with the point at issue. They were based only on the risk decades ago to workers in cement factories, heavily exposed over long periods to concentrated doses of raw asbestos. This is wholly irrelevant to what happens when people are exposed to infinitely smaller amounts of asbestos encapsulated in cement, as in the slates on many people's roofs. If Mr Monbiot had looked at the latest science (explained at length with sources in my book Scared to Death), he would have seen how a succession of studies by some of the leading asbestos scientists in the world have shown why this poses no risk at all. Even the Health and Safety Executive recognised in 2000 that risks from exposure at this level are "insignificant" or "zero". Later studies confirmed this by showing how fibres cannot physically be released from the cement in the "respirable" form that can damage human lungs. If Mr Monbiot was talking through his hat on asbestos, he did so even more obviously in moving on to his favourite hobby horse, global warming. Here he defended that warmist icon, the notorious "hockey stick" graph purporting to show temperatures having recently shot up to their highest level in the past 1,000 years. On this he claims that I had used "the claims of unqualified bloggers to refute peer-reviewed science". What Mr Monbiot failed to tell his readers was that chief among the long list of scientists who have blown the "hockey stick" out of the water is the computer analyst Steve McIntyre, who showed not least how the graph had been deliberately skewed by a flawed computer programme. When McIntyre's findings were submitted by the US Congress for examination by an expert team - led by Edward Wegman, America's most eminent statistician - they were wholly vindicated. Yet, just because the vastly respected Mr McIntyre runs a blog (Climate Audit), he is dismissed as no more than an "unqualified blogger". When it comes to falling for the claptrap of "charlatans", I'm afraid the Great Moonbat leaves the rest of us standing. Correction I have been asked by Generation Investment Management, the company set up by Al Gore, to correct a statement in last week's column. Although Mr Gore is a friend of the erstwhile managing director of Lehman Brothers, GIM has never (as was reported elsewhere) been a "client of Lehman Brothers and has no direct links with the bank at all".Carbon capture is not here yet
By Christopher Booker
Sunday, 28 September 2008
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 28/09/2008
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