Sir,
Thank you very much for the recent correspondence explaining the Government’s resolve to utilise carbon capture technology in coal fired power stations, such as Kingsnorth.
During the industrial revolution, when a great deal of coal was burnt, a lot of carbon dioxide would have been emitted. Scientists have realised that approximately one third of this carbon dioxide is missing and cannot be accounted for.
Recently NASA launched a satellite to try and determine where the missing carbon might be. Unfortunately the satellite crashed into the Antarctic ocean! This issue of missing carbon dioxide has important connotations.
The fact is that all life is carbon based on our planet and the Earth is a giant carbon recycling machine. Carbon and carbon dioxide are constantly being recycled and therefore theoretically it is not possible for carbon dioxide levels to build up in our atmosphere.
Most of the carbon ends up in the soil, sedimentary rocks and of course all plant life recycles carbon via PHOTOSYNTHESIS. Photosynthesis is a very important carbon capture process, crucial to life on our planet.
Carbon capture technology on the other hand, is presumably very important to the engineers whose jobs depend on exploring this technology! Yes it is important to create more jobs for engineers, but it’s also important to remember that mother nature does the job very efficiently in capturing carbon via photosynthesis. Therefore it would be very prudent to encourage the preservation of forests, Green Belt land, and of course domestic back gardens.
Since soil recycles carbon it is important to life on our planet that people do not concrete over their back gardens and driveways. Apparently the back gardens of Great Britain collectively cover more area than all our National Parks combined and therefore pay a crucial part in keeping our ecosystems healthy.
I feel that too much emphasis has been placed upon the evils of carbon dioxide, which is a very beneficial gas essential to life on this planet. There are far more pressing environmental concerns such as soil erosion and the rapid depletion of Earth’s resources due to the growing population. However, because the Earth is a carbon recycling machine I do not feel that is wrong to use fossil fuels if the alternative is power cuts in the future.
Recently a lot of big investors have pulled their money out of wind farms because they have realized they will not get a good return for their money. Furthermore during our recent cold winter the wind did not blow for several weeks because of the anti-cyclone. If our country had been solely reliant on wind technology and renewables we could have been in serious trouble. We also came within four days of losing our gas supplies partly due to the Russian dispute with the Ukraine.
If you stood on top of a tall building and threw 5.5 billion pounds into the wind people would think that you were crazy! Yet that is exactly what the Government is proposing to do by investing this amount of money in wind farms.
It is economically DEAD MONEY. Furthermore, wind farms in sensitive areas of outstanding beauty, such as Dorset’s “Jurassic Park” have greatly antagonised numerous bodies including the CPRE.
Certainly these monstrosities creeping over our beautiful green Albion are not a vote winner! There is already a marked tendency for countryside dwellers to vote Conservative (Countryside Alliance) and this will be further exacerbated by pursuing these wind farms.
THEY ARE BOTH A MONEY LOSER AND A VOTE LOSER.
The climate will certainly look after itself! I recently watched Al Gore’s film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. It was riddled with so many scientific errors that I spent most of the duration of the film in fits of giggles.
Faced with the choice of 5,000 wind turbines destroying the countryside or one coal-fired power station, (the equivalent in energy output), it is surely preferable to choose the coal option. These new coal-fired power stations would create infinitely more new jobs than the wind option.
Our economy needs more help right now than the climate.
Because of such issues, it seems prudent to continue the investment in coal-fired power stations, although the EU directive is making this very difficult.
With a lot of input from Caroline Lucas, Green MEP, the EU decided that coal-fired power stations must be curtailed. While I am not saying that this form of energy is perfect I have noticed a strange conundrum. In the bid to combat “global warming” some scientists have suggested pumping sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere. Sulphur particles act as a coolant by reflecting the sun’s rays back into space.
Paradoxically one of the complaints against coal-fired power stations is that they emit sulphur dioxide and therefore are considered dirty! So we seemed to have gone around in a complete circle here! It seems that coal-fired power stations will both cool the planet via the sulphur emissions, and warm it via the carbon emissions! Something to keep everyone happy! I think I will sign off here because this letter could become interminably long and boring.
Best wishes,
Susan
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