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Press Release from Make Poverty History

NEWS RELEASE, September 2009

LOCAL POLITICIANS SLAM CONTROVERSIAL POWER STATION PLANS

A PROMINENT local politician has slammed current proposals for another coal power station at Blyth.

MEP Fiona Hall said in a letter to local campaigners that the plans “fly in the face of reason”.

And the Liberal Democrat said that coal power stations that did not capture all of the climate change causing carbon dioxide were “killers”. Such technology is called ‘carbon capture and storage’ and has so far only been tested on a small scale.

Conservative politician Martin Callahan and Labour’s Stephen Hughes have also indicated their broad support for campaigners’ opposition to the plans.

Fiona Hall said: "The idea of starting with small-scale 'pilot plants' for CCS is a sound one. But it is vital that the pilots are designed to capture all the CO2 being emitted - otherwise we will be trialling a system, which is only marginally better than the non-abated coal powered plants that exist at present.

Dr David Golding CBE, who heads up the campaign against climate change in the North East, comments:

“These plans for another coal power station at Blyth should be ditched straight away.

“We are totally opposed to the construction of ‘death factories with fig leaves’ - new, full sized, coal-fired power stations, trying vainly to hide behind fig leaf-sized CCS units. The weasel words ‘Clean Coal’, are routinely applied to such systems but they are anything but clean.

“If CCS cannot be made to work at an acceptable cost - and we have to face up to the fact that this possibility, however unwelcome, is a very real one – we will have shackled ourselves to these highly polluting monstrosities for decades to come.”

ENDS

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