The Doom of Western Civilisation

[Gordon Ferguson]

I walked the dog this morning (Monday 1st December) up from Hunters Bar to Greystones through Bingham Park. The air was crisp and clear after a frosty night and I enjoyed the sunrise as I tramped uphill. At the top of Bingham Park, at the junction of Greystones Road and High Storrs Road, looking out to the east, more or less halfway between the old Hallam Towers Hotel building and the Royal Hallamshire Hospital building, right on the horizon, a great chimney was sending out a plume of smoke to the south, driven by the northerly wind.

I see this regularly on clear days from many highpoints in the west of Sheffield. I have christened it ‘The Doom of Western Civilisation’ It sits there in the distance like Mount Doom in Tolkien’s ‘Lord Of The Rings’. Unlike Mount Doom, it does not spew fire, but something invisible and much more deadly – carbon dioxide.

For this is none other than the chimney stack of Drax B.

Here are the figures (from Wikipedia):

It is over 40 miles from High Storrs - the base of the chimney is actually below the horizon.
It generates 3,945 MW, producing around 24,000 million kilowatt-hours (units) annually – 7% of the total UK electricity consumption,
It is the largest single electricity generator in the UK, and the second largest coal-fired plant in Europe, after Bełchatów Power Station in Poland.
The chimney is 259 m (850 ft), the tallest in the UK.
The station can consume up to 36,000 tonnes of coal a day, and uses between 7,000,000 and 11,000,000 tonnes of coal annually.
Coal is supplied in part from the nearby Kellingley Colliery and in bulk from Poland. Around 1,500,000 tonnes of ash and 22,800,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide are produced each year.
It is the most carbon-efficient coal-fired powerplant in the UK.
Yet this one chimney pours out more CO2 than any of the 103 smallest or least industrialized countries on the planet.
Yet this is still only about 20% of the CO2 produced by vehicles in the UK.

What manner of ring needs to be cast down this chimney to break the hold of fossil fuels over us, and who will cast it down?

[steve]

Lord of the Rings is a great metaphor for understanding our predicament. Like Gollum we're totally addicted to the power that fossil fuels give us and we can't give it up even though utilising that power threatens to destroy us. We're so consumed with it that it even distorts our thinking: we believe that climate change is not really a threat, or someone else will sort the problem out - so long as they do so without taking away the power we wield from fossil fuels.