no arguement from me about building new coal fired power stations without CCS being wrong, I just spent an afternoon last week reading the paper put together to support climate camp, and as far as I'm concerned their stance on carbon capture and storage is at least as wrongheaded.
I've done my time being harrassed by police in fields in support of groups of well meaning, but not very well researched protestors who's naive PR tactics mean that the wrong message get's out, and consensus decision making means that the views of those who've just gone along for the ride are as important as someone who's studied the subject closely for over a decade, when it comes to deciding policy / banner messages etc.
hope it goes well and all that, and it's good that you're all raising a decent level of awareness about the new build coal programme, but you're doing yourselves and the cause generally no favours by taking an anti technology stance in regards to CCS.
as I've previously pointed out, if the climate camp was to be pushing the message of no new coal without CCS, then you'd have the support of pretty much every serious energy analyst, fuel policy researcher, climate scientist etc. in the country behind you, and public opinion would also be easy to swing fully behind this cause to the point where the government would be forced to fund a pilot commercial scale CCS plant, and place a moratorium on any new coal fired plants until the success or otherwise of the pilot CCS plant could be established.
as things stand though you have a whole series of serious people lining up to agree with you on the insanity of building new conventional coal plants, but then going on to disagree with you seriously, and quite frankly make you all look like naive idiots, for your stance on CCS.
never mind getting the miners offside, which was a serious tactical error IMO.
