News Brief

New government plans to clean up coal power stations are too weak to ensure that the UK keeps its promises to cut carbon emissions, Christian Aid said yesterday (Monday, 9 November).

"Companies want guarantees about the financial risk of building new coal power stations with carbon capture and storage. We want guarantees that those power stations will not exacerbate the already devastating effects of climate change in developing countries," said Dr Alison Doig, Senior Adviser on Climate Change at Christian Aid.

"Today’s announcement by Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, will make new coal power stations less harmful to the world’s climate – but it could still allow them to remain unacceptably dirty and damaging.

"Christian Aid wants assurances that there will be near-zero carbon emissions from new coal power stations by the 2020s. And in order to meet the recommendations by the government’s Committee on Climate Change, we need a clear plan for an emissions performance standard to help cut UK power sector emissions to zero by 2030. Ed Miliband’s announcement today falls well short of that.

"Another flaw in the plan is that it has nothing to say about how the UK will transfer carbon capture and storage technology to developing countries such as India and China. It is right to spend public money on testing CCS – but the funds must be used as leverage to ensure that recipient companies share their results with poor countries."