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Clean Coal Technology

Part of Energy and Climate Change – in the House of Commons at 10:30 am on 23 April 2009.

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Photo of Gregory Barker Gregory Barker Shadow Minister (Energy and Climate Change) 10:30, 23 April 2009

The news that the Government have effectively abandoned their previously slow, embarrassingly unambitious and unfunded CCS competition and moved towards the vision for CCS that was articulated by my right hon. Friend Mr. Cameron last year is welcome, but there is still huge scepticism that this is just another Labour smokescreen of spin and rhetoric. We are to have a statement shortly on CCS, but can the Minister answer one fundamental question? Can he guarantee that not a single new coal-fired power station will be built without CCS being up and running from day one? Or is this just another Labour "Sometime never; well into the future; not on my watch" strategy to get the Government through a difficult political period?

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Alex Churchill
Posted on 24 Apr 2009 10:11 am (Report this annotation)

A very aggressive and argumentative way of putting it, but the question in his last two sentences is a good one, and sadly not one that the Minister answered. It'd be great to hear a statement from the Government that "not a single new coal-fired power station will be built without CCS being up and running from day one", but that's not the kind of statement this government seems to like making.

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