This trade in carbon emissions won't combat global warming

Europe's gas emissions trading scheme is in disarray, as reported in the Guardian (Emission permits: UK and 10 others miss deadline for setting targets, July 4). The 11 governments now "face warnings of legal action from the European commission". In fact, the scheme may well prove unworkable, not least because British industry feels it is being unfairly treated in comparison with France and Germany, which are actually calling for emission allowances that would exceed their emissions of several years' back.


In addition, the use of tradeable carbon units combined with the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) - whereby the Kyoto signatories from industrialised nations can invest in emission-reduction projects in developing countries - has huge potential for environmental damage and fraud.


Last month energy minister Malcolm Wicks gave a clear indication to the Welsh affairs select committee that "the government will commit itself to a framework that sets a long-term price for carbon, either through a domestic, EU-wide or eventually wider international trading agreement" (Carbon pricing to encourage new nuclear power stations, June 14). Wicks obviously knew that, following the energy review, Britain would be building a tranche of nuclear power stations, despite the advice of the sustainable development commission.

Wicks says that we will have to replace 30% of the UK's current gener-ating capacity over the next 20 years, mostly with nuclear power, if we want to reduce carbon emissions. But he compares the emissions from a nuclear power programme with stand-alone fossil-fuel fired plants rather than with a co-generation system, ideally operating on biofuels, which produces heat and electricity for households and industries simultaneously. Cogeneration can be combined with other renewable energies, even intermittent ones: in terms of reducing emissions this leaves nuclear power standing.

France's 60 operating PWRs emit a relatively benign 29 tonnes of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour; but that is for today's high-grade ores, which will last a few years at best. Once we consider the next grade of uranium ore down, then nuclear power burns up considerably more energy than it generates and its emissions will exceed those even of coal.

· Peter Bunyard is science editor of the Ecologist
