Drax and Today - I really must protest 11 September 06

Sometimes, even amidst the day-to-day deluge of constant news, two events collide in a way that throws an issue into stark relief. Thursday 31 August brought one of those moments. As dawn broke, hundreds of police officers mobilised around the Drax power station in Yorkshire, assuming battle formations to confront a threat from climate-change protesters to close the plant down.

Radio 4’s Today programme ran an interview with the deputy chief constable of North Yorkshire Police, Ian McPherson, focusing on the threat to law and order that the protest represented, a story that was followed an hour later by a polite interview with the chief executive of Drax, Dorothy Thompson.

That’s odd, I thought. Isn’t the BBC supposed to report both sides of the story? At no point was there any attempt to explore why the anti-Drax campaigners had set up their camp in the first place, or why they should want to do such a crazy thing as shut down a power station that supplies 7 per cent of the UK’s electricity “needs”.

No spokesperson from the Camp for Climate Action was invited to appear on the programme, and the presenters seemed far more interested in how many campaigners might be arrested than why Drax’s carbon emissions are a problem.

Then, ten minutes after the second Drax in terview, the BBC’s environment correspondent, Roger Harrabin, was sitting down with John Holdren, the eminent president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and discussing global warming. Holdren put it bluntly: “We are already experiencing dangerous human disruption of the global climate.” To continue to ignore the problem would, he suggested, be “flirting with catastrophe”, given that carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere have already “passed the safe level”.

John Humphrys may have failed to make the link, but the clinking sound I swear I heard must have been the noise of a million Radio 4 listeners’ pennies dropping into their mental slots. If the danger level has already been passed, what the hell are we doing keeping places like Drax open?

So, it is strange that it is the climate-change activists who feel the heavy hand of the law. I was at the Climate camp earlier in the week, and was struck by the continual campaign of police harassment against those entering and leaving the site. Why is trying to stop carbon-dioxide emissions an arrestable offence when the most senior scientists in the world are shouting from the rooftops about imminent catastrophe? Drax is the biggest carbon polluter in the UK, pumping out nearly 21 million tonnes of the stuff each year. Are we mad for wanting to shut the power station down? Or is it the government that is mad for not doing so?

I highly recommend the “biodiversity walk”, which skirts the perimeter of Drax’s barbed-wire fence, and where nature lovers can amble just a few metres from truly colossal mountains of pulverised coal.

You can look up at the enormous chimney, with its ever-present brown plume, and marvel as the conveyor belts chug, dumping 20 tonnes of coal every minute into the power station’s huge furnaces. You can watch as each pile of solid carbon is steadily transformed into gaseous carbon dioxide right in front of your eyes.

I want every anti-windfarm campaigner to take that walk. Every middle-class nimby who whines about their pristine view being spoiled by windmills should be frogmarched around Drax, and forced to confront the insanity of the energy status quo. Remember, people: every megawatt of power that you prevent being supplied from a clean source such as wind means a megawatt of power supplied from a dirty source such as Drax.

Imagine a Martian, here visiting Earth on a weekend break. The Martian hears how our planet’s atmosphere is heating up; how we know it is heating up; how we know, too, that heating the atmosphere is certain to have disastrous consequences; and how we also know that carbon-dioxide emissions are chiefly responsible for this heating. Imagine the Martian’s con fusion as he sees the police advancing towards the country’s biggest CO2 emitter, not to shut it down, but to protect it. Imagine his befuddlement as he tunes in to the Today programme that strange morning, and hears the presenters not draw the oh-so-obvious conclusion.

“Am I mad?” the Martian would ask himself. “Or are they?”

(By Mark Lynas. This article first appeared in the New Statesman.)