From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
There’s a again story to that BBC report about Svalbard.
Svalbard has been mining coal because the early 1900s. The final remaining mine is scheduled to close in three years time purely to assist Norway scale back emissions. The BBC is aware of which aspect it’s on:
“if the fastest-warming place on earth can’t surrender fossil fuels, what hope for in every single place else?”
It’s after all deeply ironic that Svalbard’s local weather was simply as delicate when these mines opened as it’s now!
Many of the coal produced goes to Svalbard’s coal energy station, which offers nearly all the island’s electrical energy, as properly offering district heating in Longyearbyen. The remainder of the coal is exported to European metal mills. So simply what does the BBC suggest the islanders do for heating and electrical energy when there isn’t a extra coal? Most definitely they must import it, though there are additionally plans to burn oil as an alternative. Both manner emissions will improve relatively then lower.
Within the longer run, there’s a crackpot plan to make use of hydrogen, which might be produced by electrolysis from surplus wind energy in Finnmark, a whole bunch of miles away. This wind energy doesn’t really exist in the intervening time, so extra wind farms must be constructed there. And the ensuing hydrogen must be shipped, involving extra value and emissions.
Different plans contain constructing a protracted, extraordinarily costly undersea cable or utilizing LNG.
All of those plans can be rather more costly than Svalbard’s coal energy, and would inevitably take years to implement. Within the meantime, possibly the BBC would love Svalbarders to burn whale oil, as their ancestors did prior to now. Hey, at the very least it’s “renewable”, although I doubt even the BBC would name it “inexperienced”!
However the final irony is that, because the BBC report, tourism is now the primary supply of earnings for Svalbard. As a substitute of demanding that Svalbarders surrender their coal, possibly the BBC ought to marketing campaign for an finish to emission spewing vacationer flights to Svalbard and different Arctic and Antarctic areas, so common with eco-loons.
