Government right on clean coal

If both electricity generating company E-On and the green lobby are cheering a Government announcement, it suggests that we might have got it right.

That's what's happened over the announcement that the Kingsnorth power station in Kent will only be upgraded as and when it is capable of carbon reclamation, something I argued for here a few weeks ago.

The argument now moves on to what minimum proportion of carbon should be extracted from the coal before burning; because the risk is that it will be too low - and the less that is extracted the harder it will be to reach our carbon targets.

The UK was - thanks to Labour - the first country in the world to set legally binding carbon emissions targets and now we are first at making the building of new coal-powered stations conditional upon their ability to extract carbon and, in our case, bury it deep under the North Sea.

But our long-term energy situation remains critical. We have to reduce dependence on Russian Gas and Saudi Oil. And just as we cannot meet our energy needs just by renewable energy, we can't do it just by clean coal power-plants either. We need a basket of energy sources: clean coal, renewable and nuclear - all three of which will enable the UK to meet the targets we have set ourselves on climate change by 2020.