Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Environmental
politics
Resistance and pressure for change
The pressure for a new-energy economy has largely come from the
environmental movement. Environmental organizations are now
active around the world, with groups conducting very important
campaigns even in countries such as China. In this section, however,
we concentrate on environmental campaigning in Europe and the
US, because it is here through climate policy that environmental
campaigning has had the most transparent and direct effect on the
energy sector.
Britain, for instance, has passed legislation in 2008 committing all future
UK governments to working within five-year carbon budgets so as to
reach legally binding carbon-emission reduction targets. This was a
direct result of environmental NGO pressure (see box on p.252). In this
chapter, we take a look at how the major energy sources of today - and
their counterparts in renewables - are regarded by environmental groups.
Coal: the new nuclear
Increasingly, environmental protests have targeted coal plants across
the world - in Australia, Germany, the UK and many states in the US
- because of coal's heavy carbon emissions. In the US, the Sierra Club
started its Beyond Coal campaign at the start of the twenty-first century,
pledging to “leave no new coal plant unopposed”. It vaunts considerable
success in this, claiming that, of the 150 coal power plants proposed since
2001, no fewer than 111 such projects have been “defeated or abandoned”,
and that in 2009, for the first time in six years, no work was started in the
US on any new coal project.
