Date published: 2008/02/01
The BBC says:
Environmental campaigners have accused the government of giving in to pressure from the energy company that wants to build a new coal-fired power station.
Greenpeace claims e-mails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show the government dropped carbon emission conditions for Kingsnorth.
E.ON UK wants to build two coal-fired units at the site near Rochester, Kent.
A spokeswoman for the Department for Business said it was standard practice to explore conditions with companies.
The e-mails obtained by Greenpeace concern capture and storage (CCS) technology to reduce the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere.
CCS would store CO2 as a liquid, but is still being developed.
A e-mail from E.ON to business secretary John Hutton asks that there should not be a condition on Kingsnorth that it should have CCS.
E.ON says it would be possible to draw up proposals to fit CCS technology once it was commercially viable.
The reply from the Department for Business said: "Thanks. I won't include [the conditions]".
Greenpeace said the e-mails showed the government's climate and energy policy being reversed in the face of pressure from E.ON.
...
A spokesman for E.ON said the CCS technology did not currently exist, and the company was in constant contact with the department to discuss different issues.
A very poor article from the BBC. They (courtesy of Greenpeace) selectively quote from some emails and do not give any context. But hey, if you can bash the government because you have found one group to complain about something, then it must be a good thing, as far as the BBC is concerned. Unfortunately it is not very informative. And Greenpeace is having a laugh. They are complaining about the alleged influence of E.ON on government policy, but the entire purpose of their press release (kindly regurgitated by the BBC) is to influence government policy. Oh, but of course, it's ok when they do it, because they do it using the BBC as their mouthpiece, it's just that people they don't like shouldn't do it directly with the government.
CCS technology is not currently there (in a commercially viable way), that much is true, but the question the UK should be asking is whether new coal-fired power plants should be allowed before CCS technology is viable. The article is just dealing with hypotheticals and in particular does not state (presumably because the BBC does not know) what conditions will be attached to planning permission for these power plants about installing CCS in future.
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