Chief Scientist: UK must team with China on clean coal

There’s something deeply exciting about the job ‘chief scientist’. The government has one, don’t you know. Presumably taking time off from grafting mouse heads onto baked bean cans and turning lead into gold, the UK government’s chief scientist to be, Prof John Beddington, had this to say to The Guardian:

Beddington, a population biologist at Imperial College London, said Britain would need to link with China and India to encourage the use of clean coal technology among some of the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases. Clean coal processes are designed to capture and store carbon dioxide that would be released by coal as it is burned.

“There are some immense challenges coming and clearly climate change is the biggest. We need to develop science and technology solutions to mitigating this problem as soon as we can,” Beddington told the innovation, universities and skills committee.

“Using clean coal technology may well be the most cost effective way of doing it,” he added.