New UK coal must be partly ‘clean’
From Nature News:
Any new coal-fired power station built in Britain must deploy carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology on 400 megawatts of its output, the country’s energy and climate minister Ed Miliband announced on 23 April. If the Environment Agency judges CCS to be technically and economically ‘proven’, it would have to be retrofitted to cover the full output of new plants (typically 1,000–2,000 megawatts) by 2025.
Obama promises 3% GDP for science
From Obama’s speech to the National Academies of Science:
“We will devote more than 3 percent of our GDP to research and development. We will not just meet, but we will exceed the level achieved at the height of the space race, through policies that invest in basic and applied research, create new incentives for private innovation, promote breakthroughs in energy and medicine, and improve education in math and science.”
Obama will double the budgets of key science agencies including the National Science Foundation and the National Institute for Standards and Technology. The US is also launching a new Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E) to carry out “high risk, high reward” research on clean energy, an issue Obama named as “this generation’s great project.” Nature reports that 2/3 of the envisaged spending is to come from private industry, which is thought to be an optimistic goal given the present economic downturn.
The speech can be read here. The Nature article is here.
Article: Wind, sea, coal and nuclear power. Yes please.
Article in the Times from Ed Milliband:
To crash an SUV into a Toyota Prius is the ultimate environmental faux pas – and in a memorable episode of The West Wing, the President’s adviser, Josh Lyman does just that. He organises a low-carbon summit to atone, but finishes demoralised. His summit participants all find reasons to attack each other instead of uniting around low carbon.
Too often, the energy debate in the UK feels the same. There is a temptation for people to justify opposition to each form of low-carbon power, but the truth is that on grounds of energy security and climate change, we cannot afford this luxury.