On 1st November Dorothy Thompson, CEO of Drax, delivered the Harold Wilson Lecture at Bradford University. Her lecture was entitled, ‘The challenges of running a low carbon electricity grid.’
We joined the event to raise awareness of the environmental damage caused by Drax’s burning of both coal and biomass. We distributed fliers before the event along with a bank of questions to challenge Dorothy Thompson during the Q &A session (Biofuelwatch Axe Drax 2017 flier; 01 11 0217 Drax questions). We’d like to thank Biofuelwatch for their support for this event.
Dorothy Thompson’s lecture was predictable – suggesting that the burning of 13 million tonnes of biomass per year was essential to ‘keep the lights on’ and claiming that it was good for the environment.
We were happy to provide attendees with a reality check:
· Studies show that the climate impacts of cutting down trees for biomass electricity are no better than those of coal when looked at over a period of many decades – i.e. during the crucial period when global carbon emissions must be rapidly cut.
· Burning wood and coal both release pollutants into the air, including nitrogen oxides and particulates. Drax’s air pollution was estimated to cause 590 deaths a year in 2013, and wood dust from biomass causes health problems for workers.
· Drax receives huge subsidies for burning this imported wood – about £1.5 million per day.
· These subsidies, in turn, have allowed Drax to remain open and continue to burn coal – about 2.7 million tonnes in 2016.
Alongside Drax’s ‘dirty secrets’, we were happy to challenge Drax’s downplaying of the clean energy alternative.
Recent months have seen coal providing just 2% of UK power in the first half of 2017, plummeting costs for wind and solar power, record-breaking advances and investment in battery storage and report after report on the huge gains to be made in investing in energy efficiency.
As a taster of this good news, we recommend a reading of this Guardian article from 8/11/17. All of this is bad news for Dorothy Thompson, but great news for the rest of us!
We thought that universities were confident places that promoted debate, discussion and the clashing of alternative views. Sadly, we weren’t welcomed by Bradford University.
We were open and honest with the university event organisers about plans and communicated with them in advance that we had no plans to disrupt the event and they raised no objections to our plans in their reply.
Despite this, their approach was to change the venue, announce bag searches on the day of the event, hire extra security (judging from our conversation with the security guard after the event) and to prevent us from fliering.
Unfortunately for them, their approach to us was as ineffectual as it was unreasonable. They didn’t get round to telling us that we couldn’t flier until 7 minutes before the event and even then, they neglected to tell all members of our team so some, unaware of their decision, quite reasonably kept fliering! Our estimate is that 75%-80% of attendees got the flier and questions.
Thanks again to everyone who got involved!
You can read more about Biofuelwatch’s ‘Axe Drax’ campaign here.
Kirklees Campaign Against Climate Change 