Following the disclosure last week that power-generating company Eon has been negotiating behind the scenes to get the government's backing to build the UK's first new coal-fired power station for 30 years, Greenpeace's lawyers have written to the energy minister, John Hutton, to insist that the government hold a public inquiry.
Embarrassingly for Gordon Brown, leaked emails between Eon and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) showed where the real power lies. A very gently worded request from BERR that any new Kingsnorth plant in Kent should be made with carbon capture and storage fitted (ie to remove the CO2 from the waste gases before they are released into the atmosphere) was given short-shrift by Eon.
The truth is that even if this technology could be made to work (and it is purely hypothetical at the moment), carbon capture and storage and other supposedly 'clean-coal' technologies are unlikely to be commercially available before 2020 at the earliest - far too late to make a serious contribution to our immediate climate change problems. So as it stands, if John Hutton gives the go-ahead for Kingsnorth, the government would still effectively be ripping up its plans to control CO2 emissions.
Kingsnorth is a test case: if it goes ahead many more such plants will follow in its wake and they will scupper any chances that we have of hitting our 2020 CO2 reduction targets. Kingsnorth alone would, on completion, pump out the same amount of carbon dioxide as 30 developing countries. Yet BERR is planning to nod through Eon's application within the next six weeks so that the plant can be operational by its proposed 2012 delivery date.
So yesterday our solicitors sent a letter to John Hutton demanding a public inquiry. The e-mails have revealed so much collusion between DBERR and Eon that them minister is clearly in no position to make an impartial decision on the application. A public inquiry must be held.
