The British Coal Industry is Coming Back
Britain is an island more or less built on coal. Because of a combination of cheap oil, our own, now well past-peak domestic oil, green resistance to nuclear power and conservative party hatred for miners, we now have almost no coal mines. What was the last coal mine in Wales, a spectacularly successful co-operative, closed recently. Cumbria's last deep mine has been a museum for years.
However, it will take at least a decade to bring new nuclear power on stream. Oil and gas, which are falling from recent highs, are still expensive historically, and as time goes on we can expect them to trend upwards because obtaining oil and gas at cheap prices, without a global depression, is something of a pipe dream. I do note that, adjusted for inflation, oil is below 1980 prices, but I stand by my point. Renewables will just not provide enough energy.
So we need coal, and the technology exists to produce clean coal, whatever the likes of George Monbiot and others say. Yet we get our coal from Russia and South Africa, and the world demand for that coal is going up, just as their own domestic demands increase. We are going to find that we are being priced out of coal markets.
I hate to say this, and I note the irony of a Murdoch employee saying it--but Irwin Steltzer was right yesterday; this country needs coal. I do not hate to repeat something which I wrote last year and earlier this year.
Reopen the mines.
Ask those men to back into the dark and bring back coal for their country and their hearths and their families and their socially accountable power stations.
Allow for tax-breaks for cooperatives to do it, if the men are still around who remember how.
Reestablish communities in areas devastated and enslaved to agency work after the mines and steelworks shut.
And let Margaret Thatcher live long enough to see it happen.
Britain is an island more or less built on coal. Because of a combination of cheap oil, our own, now well past-peak domestic oil, green resistance to nuclear power and conservative party hatred for miners, we now have almost no coal mines. What was the last coal mine in Wales, a spectacularly successful co-operative, closed recently. Cumbria's last deep mine has been a museum for years.
However, it will take at least a decade to bring new nuclear power on stream. Oil and gas, which are falling from recent highs, are still expensive historically, and as time goes on we can expect them to trend upwards because obtaining oil and gas at cheap prices, without a global depression, is something of a pipe dream. I do note that, adjusted for inflation, oil is below 1980 prices, but I stand by my point. Renewables will just not provide enough energy.
So we need coal, and the technology exists to produce clean coal, whatever the likes of George Monbiot and others say. Yet we get our coal from Russia and South Africa, and the world demand for that coal is going up, just as their own domestic demands increase. We are going to find that we are being priced out of coal markets.
I hate to say this, and I note the irony of a Murdoch employee saying it--but Irwin Steltzer was right yesterday; this country needs coal. I do not hate to repeat something which I wrote last year and earlier this year.
Reopen the mines.
Ask those men to back into the dark and bring back coal for their country and their hearths and their families and their socially accountable power stations.
Allow for tax-breaks for cooperatives to do it, if the men are still around who remember how.
Reestablish communities in areas devastated and enslaved to agency work after the mines and steelworks shut.
And let Margaret Thatcher live long enough to see it happen.
Comments
We also need nuclear power, in order to secure high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs for the working class, and independence from Arab oil and Russian gas.