I’ve had a very fortuitous day. It is not often that I have to work on the weekend, but I did yesterday and was cursing the cold, crisp, clear sunny day whilst I was stuck inside. However, the weather today was equally good and when I was taking the kids to school I noticed that there was a cloud inversion over the Forth Valley and beyond. Given I had time off in lieu from yesterday and the kids were in school, I immediately headed off to Cockleyroy Hill to capture the views :-
For more information on how cloud inversions form, and how to be up a mountain when one occurs head over to terrybnd and begin planning your next trip.
To see what the cloud inversion looked like from the top of Ben Lomond (which you can see in one of the photos I took) head to PTC*. He posted a remarkable YouTube video.
It’s difficult to make it work in a coal plant and the idea that you can somehow make coal cleaner is not an easy one to make a reality.
The idea is, however, much more likely to succeed at a gas plant and the money available for CCS is likely to stay in Scotland, at Peterhead.
says Caron but I fail to see how it is more likely at a gas plant. It’s difficult to make work in a coal plant because the problem hasn’t been solved. And it hasn’t been solved at a gas plant either.
It would be better to make the money available for other things, such as not reducing Solar FiT, funding the rail network properly, or putting billions aside for the increasing disaster relief needed in the coming years.
Or, investing more in proper renewable power and not building any new Carbon Capture and Ctorage “ready” coal plants. Everyone from Alex Salmond and the SNP, through George Osbourne and the Conservatives and Chris Huhne and the LibDems are failing here. (And the only reason Labour are currently failing is that their not in power)
It would seem to me that most of those who energetically campaign against the planting of wind farms in their bosky vales do so not out of a profound appreciation of the dew-jewelled web of life, but merely as spectators who wish the show that they’ve paid admission for to go as advertised. After all, hardly anyone really lives in the country any more and a mere fraction of the population work on the land.
For the rest, they look upon it from their terraces and their decking, they stroll a few hundred yards across it, and then they get in their off-road vehicles to drive on the road to the nearest town or city, where they sit in an office staring at a computer screen.
Read the whole article – couldn’t have said it better myself.
Alba Matters: iDespairAtHumanity – "This is what I'm getting at. He made consumer gadgets a bit more user-friendly and prettier. Being able to check Twitter on the bus has not changed the world – it's just given us an extra option for frittering away time when we're at a loose end. "
Not wanting to be left out of my little blog, the SNP are trying their hardest to ignore all their green credentials and promises that may have won them
a few Regional Votes at the expense of the Scottish Green Party.
Anyone want to dispute that coal power stations are about the least green way of producing electricity (except maybe shale gas fracking) so why does the Scottish Government “welcome” the news that a legal challenge to a new coal power station in Hunterston has failed?
But, fear not, because the power station will be carbon capture and storage (CCS) ready!
I assume that means that the power station will be built in such a way, then when CCS has been invented you could just plug it into the coal station and it will stop polluting. How it can be designed to be ready when the technology hasn’t been completed yet is anyone’s guess, but that is the least of the problems with CCS.
Now, there are two small problems with CCS. Firstly, not only does it not yet work, it hasn’t been proven that it can work, nor that it will do anything in the long term to reduce pollution. You might as well invest in test tubes because they are Nuclear Fusion Ready.
The other problem for CCS is that the money is being pulled from it. Even if it was possible, noone wants to put their money where there mouth is.
So I guess the new coal station gets built without CCS and is just as polluting as all the others.
Another coal station is not being replaced. So that’s good news. The bad news is that it is being replaced by a gas station. I think this shows that the SNP’s promise to provide 100% of Scotland’s energy with renewables as a money/job making scheme. All very well, but it is not a green policy.
I think I’ve said it before, but being the “Greenest Government Ever“(TM) is not actually a very hard target to aim for. That said, the current Conservative/LibDem coalition is doing it’s very best to fail to meet that target.
At the Tory Party conference yesterday, George Osborne laid out his plans to avoid being the “Greenest Government Ever”(TM) by saying :-
”So let’s at the very least resolve that we’re going to cut our carbon emissions no slower but also no faster than our fellow countries in Europe.”
Basically, because the EU targets are less than the targets the UK are committed, George Osborne has just stated that they now plan to not meet those targets. As Damian Carrington of the Guardian points out :-
The fears of green campaigners are being realised: that the Conservative zeal for the environment was a decontamination strategy aimed at swing voters and only truly believed by a few. In front of the Tory troops, the chancellor finally revealed his true colours.
The LibDems are saying that they are taming the Tory beast and saving us from their worst excesses. Do they have it in they to save us, and save themselves from being part of “The Make The Most Promises About the Environment; and Brake The Most Promises About the Environment Government Ever“(tm)
