New Coalmine Approved

[DNBU]

Apologies if there’s been threads about this already, but reading about Michael Gove approving plans to open the UK’s first coalmine in 30 years in Cumbria has floored me.

How is this long term thinking? What about investing in renewal energy jobs?

China are aware that change is needed. This is from a paper released by the CCP in 2021:

11．Strictly controlling fossil fuel consumption. Coal consumption will be reduced at an accelerated pace. We will strictly limit the increase in coal consumption over the 14th Five-Year Plan period and phase it down in the 15th Five-Year Plan period, when petroleum consumption will reach its peak plateau. Coal-fired power will be developed in coordination with power supplies and peak shaving capacities, so as to strictly control coal-fired power generation projects. Upgrades and power flexibility retrofitting projects should be accelerated for existing coal power generators. The burning of bulk coal will be gradually phased out before the introduction of a complete ban.
...
12．Actively developing non-fossil energy. We will carry out initiatives to substitute renewable energy for fossil fuels, vigorously develop wind, solar, biomass, marine, and geothermal energy sources among others, and continuously increase the share of non-fossil energy in total energy consumption.

You may say it's only paying lip service to the ideals, but frankly that's more than what we're getting from the UK govt at the moment.

Lord Deben is the biggest stinking hypocrite of the lot of them - has spent his entire career as a Tory (if you are old like me you will remember him feeding his kids burgers on TV during BSE) and he remains a Tory peer - and yet he claims to oppose this. What a useless tool.

Sustainable energy has huge potential. We’re an island; wind and tidal energy potential is huge) but the our governments don’t think long term, so our output is low.

(The coal from this mine would be used for steel production… which there’s in new emerging ‘green’ methods for)

I am not one to catasrophise but the climate is fucked and unless we , collectively as a planet, make some large sacrifices quickly, hundreds of thousands of people will die in climate related natural disasters in the near future, like the next 5-10 years.
Obviously noone wants to be preventing ambulances from getting to where they need to go but the pace of movement is glacially slow and needs speeding up. I am not sure how else it will get moving? I wish there was a for me to show my support for change and put pressure on our government without supporting the just stop oil guys but at the moment I can't think of one that I am not already doing. ..

You know that you're sitting in a house that you can heat at the flick of a switch? Solar panels and wind ain't heating all the homes in the UK. Not now, not ever.

Learn about energy and what it takes to generate enough to heat a house, rather than just soaking up the factless fluff that politicians spout. I'm sick of people spouting these fantasies and of people buying into them without proper thought - because we're at a point where this rhetoric is killing people.

It's in my town. The locals are really supporting it, the offcomers not so much.

At the moment coal is transported to the uk from Africa.

It will be fantastic for the local area and just a drop in the ocean (no pun intended) on the global warming issue around the world.

👏🏻

Why are nuclear power stations taking 20 years to build?

Who actually owns the wind farms and the green energy produced in the UK?

Who owns/rents the oilfields offshore?

Why if we are so asset rich in oil etc are we paying so much?

It's not only producing the coal which, while it's needed, makes more sense than buying it in. It is also the cost and emissions saved on transporting coal from overseas
I'm not pro fossil fuels long term but this seems a sensible stopgap

I agree that individuals are slow to change habits. We all like our lives. Not many will voluntarily sacrifice their standard of living to reduce their carbon footprint.

Which is why it needs to be easy and cheap. Things are changing, it's unfortunate it's about 20 years later than it should have been.

Industry is changing. They are decarbonising. The financial liability of not is too great.

And yes I can see a day when the UK is self sufficient in energy and even a net exporter. Onshore and offshore wind. Solar. Energy stored as hydrogen. 10 years time the energy market will be very different.

No more burning dinosaurs.

The Crown Estate owns the seabed. Commercial companies pay something similar to rent to exploit the resource. They invest £££ to get oil, generate electricity. And sell it. Lots of multinational companies. Who pay tax.

Energy is expensive. But the better we get at producing It, the cheaper it becomes. Nuclear is extremely expensive and doesn't properly account for waste. The cost of producing offshore wind has plummeted as technology improved.

Onshore wind is very cheap but the Tories are ideologically opposed.

The UK is an island. Why don't they use water power?