The letter from CD Moyes (‘Navitus Bay is a red herring’, April 4), advocating the diversion of subsidies from wind energy to coal, was unfortunately timed.

That first week in April was the week of the smog that suffocated south east England, reminding us of the continuing dangers to human health from air pollution, much of it produced by coal-fired power stations.

It was also the week the IPCC published its report highlighting the costs of having to adapt to climate changes caused mainly by the CO2 emitted by coal-fired power.

To cap it all, UK Coal announced that it was planning to close two of Britain’s three remaining deep coal mines, because they were no longer able to compete on the world market.

Development of the ‘clean coal’ that CD Moyes anticipates would certainly be costly, but its effectiveness is extremely doubtful. No matter how much money is thrown at it, coal remains a relatively carbon-intensive and dirty fossil fuel.

Investment in pollution control technology reduces the amount of toxic pollutants in its smoke, but it does not eliminate them.

Technologies to improve plant efficiency reduce the CO2 emissions that make coal-fired power the main human source of climate change, but only marginally. And carbon capture and storage is yet to evolve beyond the demonstration stage.

If combined with conventional coal-fired power, it would require the consumption of significant amounts of energy to compress, transport and store the gas, and the availability of vast disposal sites in which to bury the compressed gas.

Transport and storage issues might be less of an issue if carbon capture was combined with underground coal gasification, but that technology is very much in it’s infancy, and is likely to be especially costly to develop.

Wind energy is inherently low polluting and low carbon, and its costs are coming down as it expands in scale. Diverting resources from this renewable energy source to supposedly cleaned-up coal would intensify damage to our health and to the stability of our climate, for no short-term financial benefit. ALAN NEALE, Poole