‘We can’t keep on burning coal if we’re going to hit climate targets’

 
Joseph Watts28 June 2013
WEST END FINAL

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Ed Davey does not shy from a political punch-up. Only last week the Energy Secretary called climate change deniers a bunch of “crackpots”. There was also the long battle the Liberal Democrat fought with George Osborne over renewable energy subsidies. With that over, Davey has chosen a new target: the fossil fuel industry. No one can accuse him of lacking ambition. “Coal’s life is in danger,” the Cabinet minister told the Standard. “People know that if we are going to hit our carbon targets, we can’t burn coal in the 2030s and 2040s. Coal has to come off the system.”

Britain still gets 40 per cent of its energy from coal. UK Coal employs 2,500 people and mines seven million tonnes of the black stuff annually. But Davey is telling the industry it will not survive unless carbon capture and storage technology is used. Currently, it’s too expensive to be commercially viable.

Even the gas industry, seen as the big energy hope in the short term, will have to fall into line. The Lib-Dem said: “Moving away from coal to gas is a big climate change win. Long term — by which I’m talking decades away, yeah of course — in order to get our carbon emissions down even further, gas as well will have to have carbon capture and storage attached to it.”

He backs community energy schemes in which neighbourhoods unite to buy energy cheaply — seen by some as a way that the little people can challenge the big power of energy companies.

If all that doesn’t annoy the “crackpots”, Davey’s free admission that there are upfront costs to his plan of making the British economy greener will.

Failing to make homes, businesses and power stations greener will be more expensive in the long run, he says. “Everyone says renewables are incredibly expensive, [but] the cost of onshore wind, which is our biggest renewable — it’s proven technology — is £6 a year on people’s bills. Set that against the fact that gas prices are about 50 per cent of an average dual energy bill.”

His willingness to take on an argument comes from a sense of his own integrity rather than bravado. Davey has not had the easiest of lives. His parents died when he was a child, and he was brought up by grandparents.

He was given a bravery award for rescuing a woman who fell on rail tracks at Clapham Junction as a train hurtled towards her. “I got up and was shaking rather a lot. They gave me a cup of tea, they took my name and I just went home,” he said afterwards.

Elected MP for Kingston and Surbiton in 1997 with a wafer-thin majority of 56, he has since boosted his lead to 7,560. He was drafted into the cabinet after Chris Huhne’s downfall and in the cuts of this week’s spending round he came out a relative winner, taking on hefty infrastructure investment.

No wonder Davey is happy to praise George Osborne despite having “arguments” with him over his departmental budget. “The Chancellor is acting as a finance minister should, asking tough questions about how money is being spent,” he said.

“The funding for energy infrastructure, yes it comes from private investment, but some of it is inevitably paid for by the consumer, and the consumer is the taxpayer. The Chancellor was quite right to ask those questions, I was never concerned about that. But we needed a healthy debate.”

He brushes aside suggestions that Coalition policies are fuelling a new house price bubble — pertinent in London where the average price now hits £454,644. “Any politician or economist who said you shouldn’t ever worry about that would be misreading the post-war economic history of the UK where you have had housing bubble after housing bubble,” said Davey.

“But I think we are a long, long, long way from a housing bubble in the United Kingdom now. The housing market has been relatively quiet, obviously a bit more active in London.”

There is, however, one fight he does not want, reflected in his nervousness discussing David Cameron’s rhetoric on arming Syrian rebels. Davey was an outspoken critic of the Iraq war and said some time ago that it was “time to have tea with the Taliban”. Asked if he could ever see British troops in Syria he said: “No. I think it’s highly, highly unlikely. That’s not being discussed.

“We’re not arming rebels, number one. Number two, what we have done is increase the pressure on Damascus, particularly on Assad. We have to say to the regime underneath Assad, ‘Listen, we know you’ve got a role to play post-Assad and we want to work with you and the opposition to find a way forward’.”

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