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Coal has a very high carbon content, so is a major source of greenhouse gasses and the economic costs of polluting the atmosphere are not borne by the polluter, In economic jargon, ‘the externalities are not internalised’.

Coal will be the biggest single source of electricity for decades to come. Yet the EU is doing far too little to encourage the take-up of carbon capture and storage, a technology which could make coal a low-carbon fuel. This failure threatens not only Europe’s leadership of global climate change policy but also its ability to profit from the emergence of a huge global market for equipment and expertise. Stephen Tindale and Simon Tilford argue that more public money is needed for the construction of demonstration projects, while regulation and strong market signals will be required to ensure mass deployment of the technology.

Coal will be the biggest single source of electricity for decades to come. Yet the EU is doing far too little to encourage the take-up of carbon capture and storage, a technology which could make coal a low-carbon fuel. This failure threatens not only Europe’s leadership of global climate change policy but also its ability to profit from the emergence of a huge global market for equipment and expertise. Stephen Tindale and Simon Tilford argue that more public money is needed for the construction of demonstration projects, while regulation and strong market signals will be required to ensure mass deployment of the technology.

It will be cheaper to control climate change than not to control it, as the Stern Review memorably said. However, that does not mean that it will be cheap.

This morning, the Centre for European Reform (www.cer.org.uk) launched the report, which Simon Tilford and I have written, about what the EU should do about CCS. We argue that large-scale demonstration will require public money, and that widespread and rapid deployment will require regulation, ideally at European level.

This month, the UK’s energy regulator, the Office of Gas and Electricity markets, has published Project Discovery. This grandiose title accurately reflects the fact that Ofgem has finally ‘discovered’ that its previous approach – leaving as much as possible to the market – has not worked and will not enable the UK to meet the challenges of climate change and energy security, while also protecting consumers.

On 9 November Ed Miliband, the UK Energy and Climate Change Secretary, published National Policy Statements outlining the government policy on energy. These are intended as guidance to the new Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC), which, from next March, is due to grant or refuse planning permission on major energy and transport infrastructure projects. The statements are good on renewables, nuclear and electricity networks, but less good on coal.

Last Friday Eon, announced that it is postponing its plan to build a new power station in Kent that would have demonstrated that carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology can be retrofitted. The same day, the energy regulator, the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem), published a report accepting that energy prices would have to increase, but would increase much less under a move to low-carbon energy than under a scenario under which the UK relies on gas and oil. And today, the Committee on Climate Change launches its first report on how the UK is doing on meetings its carbon budgets – basic message: ‘not nearly well enough’.

Today, I attended a conference organised by Business for a New Europe and the Centre for European Reform on Is the EU good for business?. The general answers was (unsurprisingly, given the organisers) ‘yes, generally, but could be better’.

On Monday, 13 July 2009, Ed Miliband, the UK Energy and Climate Change Secretary, opened the Little Cheyne Court wind farm in Kent. With a capacity of just under 60Mw, this is the largest wind farm in South East England.

Presidents Hu and Obama met today in Beijing and climate change was high on the agenda. China and the US are now the two largest producers of greenhouse gas emissions, responsible for over a third of total annual global emissions – though the US has caused 30% of the total historical contribution, whereas China has contributed just 7%, and US per capita emissions are 23.5 tons, whereas China’s are 5.5 tons.

In November 2009, 3% of OECD electricity was generated by renewables other than hydro. 14% came from hydro. And this was only 17% of what electricity was then used, not total energy used.

President Obama has done more to control climate change than President Bush ever did. However, that is hardly setting the bar very high.

This week, I have been to Brussels for meetings on energy efficiency, renewables, nuclear and CCS. The now-ratified Lisbon Treaty says that there will, in the future, be a common energy policy, but this is unlikely to have much practical impact, but the EU has achieved much in important areas.

Burning coal is an extremely damaging way to generate electricity. Coal has a very high carbon content, so is a major source of greenhouse gasses. Burning it also results in pollutants that are directly damaging to human health, such as sulphur dioxide.

Yesterday, I attended a talk by Pat McFadden, a minister in the UK’s Business Department, about how the UK should move to a low-carbon economy. His main point was that the UK is still a manufacturing economy, despite the common view that everything manufactured is now imported. He also talked about the enormous opportunity for people in the UK to make wind turbines.

In the words of Nobel-prize winning chemist Paul Crutzen, we live in a new geological era – the anthropocene. He chose this name because, since the industrial revolution, the human influence on climate has been so great that we are already engineering the climate, albeit not deliberately.

President Obama has unveiled a $3.4 billion programme to upgrade the US electricity grid, turning it into a ’smart grid’. This will make it more efficient, so that less energy is lost during transmission and distribution, and it will be easier to harness renewables, including intermittent ones like wind and solar.

Angela Merkel’s victory in Germany’s election was not unexpected. What was less clear was who her coalition partner would be, but we now know that it will be the FDP. This party is liberal, in both economic and social senses. It is also very pro-business and in favour of tax cuts and is now arguing for reductions in subsidies.

Yesterday I went to Brussels for a seminar on CCS with Ruud Lubbers, who used to be prime minister of the Netherlands and is now running the Rotterdam Climate Initiative.

The lack of substantial progress at Copenhagen, though not unexpected, has left many people close to despondency on climate change. There is now a serious danger that they will lose interest. More worrying is the danger that the media will lose interest, leading to politicians doing likewise.

On Tuesday 2 February 2010, European Union member states agreed to European Commission proposals on how to distribute billions of Euros collected under the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) to CCS and renewable energy projects.

For the next six months, Spain holds the Presidency of the EU and, from the start of February, there will be a new European Commission. Spain and Germany lead the EU on wind and solar power, so there are good grounds to hope that the new leadership will result in a major speeding up of the low carbon transition.

Warren Buffet, the iconic investor who has proved time and again that it is quite possible to ‘pick winners’, has made his biggest investment so far – $26 billion in one of the main rail operators in the US, Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF). It is good news that Buffet regards rail as a future winner.

The Irish have voted to accept the Lisbon Treaty so, unless the Czech Republic or Poland decide unexpectedly to refuse to do so, the Treaty of Lisbon will come into force. This will not have a significant direct effect on climate and energy policy, but it will enable to EU to focus on more important things rather than endless institutional wrangling.

The Copenhagen Climate Summit starts today. Prospects are looking better than they were a few weeks ago and the fact that President Obama has decided to attend the final negotiating session, rather than just for a token visit at the start, is excellent.

President Obama’s meeting with the Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari on 6 May understandably focussed on how to combat the Taliban and control Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

The US budget deficit has more than tripled to a record $1.4trn (£877bn, €948bn) in the year to 30 September 2009, due to increased government spending and a big drop in tax revenues. So, how is the US going to pay for a transition to a low-carbon economy?

UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, today gave his pre-budget report to parliament. This included some good climate measures.

Geoengineering is the term given to proposals to try to control the climate through technologies, some of them new and bizarre, and unlikely to happen or to work if they did, some of them are new ways of applying old approaches and some of them new but likely to work.

Germany led the world on wind energy until 2007. In 2008, it was overtaken in terms of total installed capacity, though not percentage of energy coming from wind, by the USA. It remains the world’s top photovoltaic (PV) installer, accounting for almost half of the global market in 2007 – though this generates only about 1% of total electricity used in Germany.

No form of electricity generation is entirely free of carbon emissions. So just how carbon free are the main types?

Rapid and extensive demonstration of carbon capture and storage (CCS) is necessary to show that it works as well at larger scales as it does at smaller scales, and that it works throughout the generation, capture, transport and storage process.

There are several myths or misunderstandings that have grown up surrounding climate change and renewable energy. Both sides of the debate can be at fault. This article tries to debunk some of nonsense that is often cited as fact.

How well have Obama and Energy Secretary Chu done so far on promoting energy efficiency, renewables, CCS and electric vehicles? A very positive assessment is made by the Center for American Progress.

Climate change is a contentious topic in Canada, largely due to the nation’s long-standing ties to the fossil fuel industry. At the forefront of Canadian discourse on this topic is the Province of Alberta’s famous “dirty” tar sands oil production. This is followed closely by the coal-fired electricity industry. From a high-level perspective, these two well-established, carbon-intensive industries, combined with the provincial and federal governments’ reluctance to limit their emissions in a meaningful way, form the basis upon which Canada has historically failed to engage in climate change discussions and continues to fail to significantly address climate change.

What about boring old natural gas? I can’t find any mention of it anywhere on your site and I wonder how much you or your readers know about the recent revolution in unconventional “shale” gas which has meant some geologists think that there is nine times more natural gas available on a planetary scale than thought as little as two or three years ago.

Nick Grealy

Apart from CCS, there is much good sense on all sides of the debate on measures to reduce carbon emissions. Why haven’t you mentioned the ultimate medium term opportunity – nuclear fusion?

Leighton Upton

Yesterday (9 November 2008), the UK Energy and Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband, published National Policy Statements (NPS) outlining the government policy on energy. They consist of guidance to the new Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC), which, from next March, is due to grant or refuse planning permission on major energy and transport infrastructure projects. The statements are area a mixed bag – good on renewables, nuclear and electricity networks, but less good on coal.