Source: BBC Radio 4: Today Programme
URL: N/A
Date: 30/05/2013
Event: Lord Smith on the UK's "dash for coal" - now "over 40% of our electricity generation"
People:
James Naughtie: Now we're burning more coal for energy generation than at any time since the mid '90s. The main reason is that the world price of coal has been dropping. It's because there's a glut in the United States, with the drop in gas prices, there. But the Head of the Environment Agency Lord Smith, the former Environment Secretary Chris Smith, says that all this is threatening health, and it's also undermining the government's target for tackling climate change. He's in the radio car now - good morning.
Lord Smith: Good morning, Jim.
James Naughtie: Now, we're told that the amount of coal being used in electricity generation now has jumped, because of the cost of coal. What, in your view, is the consequence of that?
Lord Smith: Well, it has indeed jumped, and the figures are rather remarkable. A year and a half, two years ago, we were getting something like 29% of our electricity generation out of coal. We're now getting over 40% of our electricity generation out of coal. And you're absolutely right to identify the main cause of this as being the dramatic fall in gas prices in the United States, as a result of the exploitation of shale gas, which has meant that the United States has been seeking to put its coal elsewhere around the world at very cheap prices. We're importing something like two thirds of the coal that we burn, at the moment, so this is not about domestic production, it's about importing coal from around the world.
One of the consequences of this is that we're already seeing, in the course of the last 12 months, things like sulphur dioxide emissions rising, here in the UK. We've had real progress on this, over the last ten years here, we've seen sulphur dioxide emissions, for example, dropping by something like 70%, over the decade. Those are now going up again. And so this dash for coal, that we're in the middle of, at the moment, can't and shouldn't last for too long, if we care about what we're putting out into the air and what we're breathing.
James Naughtie: Well, I suppose the question that lies behind what you're saying is what the government should do about it, in your view.
Lord Smith: Well, one of the things that the government are rightly saying is that gas, and particularly shale gas, offers us a useful solution. My view is it's only an interim solution, but it does offer something of a solution, which would be certainly better than coal. And the... over the course of the next six or seven years, I suspect that what we'll be seeing - and I certainly hope we'll be seeing - is a move away from this reliance on coal and the development of more gas. What we can't do, however, is see that as a permanent, long-term solution. Gas is better than coal, but it's still a massively carbon-generating fuel that does quite a lot of damage, over the long term, to our environment.
James Naughtie: Lord Smith - Chris Smith - thanks for joining us.