Coal and Climate Change

As I live in a former mining village, there are still plenty of people who used to work in the coal mines here. Even though the Chopwell pit closed in 1966. Therefore most of the people who were actually involved in mining are retired. There are others who were the children of miners who still hanker for this dead industry. While most of the retired miners are actually glad to see the back of the industry.

It was a seriously dangerous industry and in the 1930s one fifth of all miners were injured in some way or another in the mines and as a quarter of the working population was employed in mining that meant that many hundreds of thousands of people in the mining areas were injured or disabled at any one time. As is typical in my village, the houses were owned by the mine company, therefore if a miner lost his job via injury then the family lost their house too.

Thus it is the retired former miners who know what it really was like who tend to be less willing to accept the modern practice of open cast mining. For them every scuttle of coal is mixed with blood and bones.

Yet anyone who listens to government ministers talking about the energy mix to deal with climate change, will hear them constantly mention clean coal along with wind and nuclear power. That means the government is betting on some form of carbon capture and storage technology being developed and adopted. Thus far this technology has yet to be proven to work especially on the scale of the large power stations that operate in the real world.

Also the energy regulator this week was predicting price rises of sixty percent for energy costs in Britain The main reasons for this increase in charges is the costs of carbon capture as while the technology works after a fashion, it only does this at a price. Further is the cost of building nuclear, and this does not take account of the hidden costs of decommissioning or the nuclear waste.

However there will be a major environmental cost of the government relying upon the mythical clean coal, the landscape will be scared with the wounds of open cast mines. Its ironic but just as America and its government is waking up to the damage of “Mountain Topping” and is starting to regulate against the practice, here in Britain the government is allowing similar practices.

In the immediate area, a five mile radius of my home, there are plans for three open cast sites. If I extend that radius to ten miles there are eight sites either planned or working.

If clean coal can not be made to work the government will be adding to the carbon emissions rather than reducing them. Also the waste from open cast mining creates pollution with heavy metals and other toxins leaching out of the spoil while the mines are operated. It was only during the 1980s that the spoil heaps from the deep mines were cleaned up and the environment started to recover. This can be seen in the clean water and fish now back in the rivers and becks and the return of animals like Otters. What the government is planning and already carrying out, is reversing the clean up of recent decades.

There have been increasing reports over the last five years where central government has overruled local planning rejections of open casting and enforced this unwanted industry upon communities across the country, all in the name of “The National Interest” Further the government is attempting to change the planning rules to make it easier for them to speed up infrastructure projects like mines and nuclear power stations. In effect impose them upon communities that don't want them.

While it may surprise some, back in the early part of the last century miners were considered the lowest of the low, in the same way that the unemployed are today. I suspect that if this government plan goes ahead and many more open cast sites are opened up, the mines and the people working on them will be equally despised. Especially as people see the areas that were once beautiful become scared by the mines again.