Is no coal necessarily good?
Greenpeace activists hung a banner from The Peninsula Hotel yesterday, branding CLP（中電）as a "climate criminal". They urged the company to stop burning coals, which causes excessive carbon dioxide emissions and hence the global climate change.I absolutely agree that the coal-burning plant is very dirty and want it to close immediately. However, can we do without electricity? Yes, burning coal is bad, but I am afraid without electricity is even worse. One example: the critically-ill patients in the hospitals will die as the life-support machines do not operate. Burning coal is unhealthy, without electricity is lethal.
Greenpeace suggests CLP to develop renewable energy. But wind energy or solar energy require a lot of land to gather enough wind and sunlight to generate electricity. And where do we find these lands in this tiny territory? Even if you can find the land, wind energy or solar energy is much more expensive than coal energy. We can expect our electricity tariffs to jump. I don't know how wide the gap is, but the computer game SimCity 4 suggests that solar energy is 3 times more expensive than coal energy. If so, the citizens and business have to face a 300% increase in tariff. Is it necessarily good for our society? We can expect more restaurants to close due to the huge electricity expenses. And the business will either leave our city because of the huge operating cost, or cut our salary to keep their business afloat. We will have cleaner air, but more jobless and poor people. The public have to weigh the pros and cons.
I am deeply concerned about the environment. I hope the campaign of Greenpeace will be a success and the coal plant will disappear forever. But I fear that supporting scrapping the coal-plant may do more harm than good. I hope the Greenpeace, as an environmental expert, can suggest where to build the new plants and how to cover the huge costs. So that I can feel at ease when I support an energy switch, knowing that it is not at the expense of the grassroots, who is already poor enough and underpaid. Don’t expect the CLP to do the study, they are no environment expert. They are business expert.
It is just like the religious organizations. They hope to ban soccer-gambling or even horse-racing and Mark Six. But they don't know their movement is at the expense of many NGOs subsidized by the Jockey Club. I doubt if I should follow them, stating something is immoral or illegal but being inconsiderate towards others in need, which is an immoral act itself. It is true that coal is the major source to generate electricity and the importance of coal cannot be changed in the foreseeable future. However, I still think the electric company should take the first step of shifting the domination of coal to some other renewable energy sources as you stated. If I push your points further, it is not just simply environmental issue. It will affect your health and lead to cancer (as you could imagined, those dust particles from burning coal). I will think this is more like a long term investment and obviously a certain price must be paid to achieve such goal. For example, we now have hybrid car and developing hydrogen cell car so we do not need to use gasoline as the only option for energy source. Why do we do that? The manufacturing and reseraching cost is obviously a lot higher than using the regular car. The reason is quite obvious, which I believe kind of parallel to this topic. To conclude, I think we must move forward for a better environment. How quickly do we move and how do we balance the problems you stated? These questions we can filter-004ed later on after the electric company is willing to take an active role on protecting the environement.
[[i] 本帖最後由 smallsnow 於 2008-10-15 10:43 AM 編輯 [/i]]
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