The British planned Cumbria coal mine makes climate goals even harder to achieve

The UK receives strong criticism from climate change scientists and activists for its decision to proceed with plans to develop the country’s first deepest coal mine in thirty years, despite warnings that it could destroy the country’s climate change target . net carbon emissions by 2050.

In a letter dated 29 January, the Climate Change Committee, an independent body advising the UK government on progress towards emissions targets, said the opening of the mine would lead to significant increases in the UK’s annual CO2 emissions. If the mine is allowed to operate until 2049 as currently planned, the committee says the UK’s goal is to achieve net release by 2050, which many experts have said is not fast enough.

The mine will be developed in the west of Cumbria, a province in the north-west of England, which according to the Guardian has seen ‘years of redundancies and high unemployment rates’ due to the closure of a major chemical plant and the dismantling of a nuclear facility. in the area. . According to the BBC, the Cumbria provincial council, which approved the project, said so because it would create jobs in an area of ​​high unemployment.

But scientists and climate activists have thwarted the decision to continue mining.

On February 3, Jim Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, wrote a letter to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson warning that the ongoing plan to open the mine shows a contemptuous disregard for the future of young people and nature. and that it would result in Johnson’s ‘humiliation’ at COP 26, the annual UN climate change conference that the UK will be hosting in Glasgow later this year.

Hansen, known for testifying before the US Congress in 1998 about the science of human-induced warming, gave Johnson the option to be part of the changing history of climate change or to face street protests .

‘If you’re leading the UK, as host of the COP, you have the chance to change our climate trajectory, by earning the UK and yourself historic praise – or you can do business almost as usual and in the streets of Glasgow, London and around the world, ”reads the letter from Hansen.

In a response to Hansen, Johnson’s government said it was leading the fight against global warming by “reducing emissions by more than any major economy so far”, citing ambitious plans to cut UK emissions by 20% by 2030 reduced compared to 1990 levels, a reference point agreed by the more than 100 countries that signed the Paris Climate Agreement in 2016.

“We are committed to ending the use of coal for electricity by 2025 and ending direct government support for the fossil fuel sector abroad,” the letter reads.

But if the UK has committed to ending domestic coal use for electricity by 2025 and ending government support for overseas fossil fuel projects, how can it continue to open a new coal mine?

Woodhouse Colliery is not your average coal mine – or so the mining company says

Woodhouse Colliery – the name of the Cumbria mining project, run by West Cumbria Mining – would be the first new deepwater mine in the UK in thirty years. The last deep coal mine operated in North Yorkshire was shut down in 2016 – “putting an end to centuries of deep coal mining in Britain”, according to the then BBC report.

The Woodhouse mine would reverse the trend if it were opened. It will dig up coal, also known as metallurgical coal, from below the Irish Sea to make coke, a “form of almost pure carbon” used to make steel. Coal from the mine will help drive the steel industry in the UK and Western Europe.

According to West Cumbria Mining, the coal will be “processed into a plant that is a building in a building” to further reduce the noise, dust and light effects. “As a result, the company says the mines are ‘cleaner, safer to work in and more sympathetic to their environment. ”

In the March 2019 report, Cumbria City Council claims the mine would be carbon neutral – a term that refers to the state of net carbon dioxide emissions, which is achieved by eliminating the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, or by capturing or capturing carbon emissions compensate by processes such as planting trees. According to the Cumbria County report, coal from the Cumbria mine will replace the need for coal from elsewhere, which he says makes carbon neutral.

But a report by Green Alliance, an independent think tank and charity in the UK in January 2020, threw cold water on the Cumbria mine’s carbon neutral claims. The report argues that according to basic economic theory, “an increase in the supply of a commodity, such as coal, would lower the price, leading to increased demand and thus greater emissions.”

As a result of this increase in demand, the authors of the report say that the steelmaking industry will have less incentive to use or recycle the coal it uses efficiently. The industry will also be less likely to work out alternative ways of producing steel, such as through the Direct Reduced Iron Process that uses natural gas – still a fossil fuel, but less polluting than coal.

In defense of the coal mine, the Cumbria County Council also proposed that the coal produced would be used in the UK and the EU, ending the emission of coal imports. But according to the Green Alliance’s report, the land council claims without evidence that no emissions from transportation will compensate the compensation for the mining of coal.

The bottom line, according to the Green Alliance, is that Woodhouse Colliery will not be carbon neutral with its plans to produce 2.43 million tons of coke coal a year. It will produce 9 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, a measure of greenhouse gas emissions based on their potential global warming.

And that does not even include emissions from mining.

The British government has bought into the false dichotomy of climate action against jobs

The new mine will be located in Cumbria province near Whitehaven, one of the poorest towns in the UK, with 14 per cent of households having financial problems paying heat bills from 2018 onwards. The attractiveness of 500 new jobs, which according to mining company Woodhouse Colliery would be producing, is difficult for some local leaders and citizens to overlook (although there is local opposition).

“But that’s not true,” Tim Crosland, director of Plan B, a British organization that supports legal action to combat climate change, told me in an interview. Crosland disputes that the promise of ‘a few hundred dubious jobs in a dying industry’ would ultimately be worthwhile for the people of Cumbria. “We need good quality sustainable work for the future,” Crosland added.

The government is afraid that the cancellation of the mine is a choice between work and environmental aspects, Crosland told me.

“The government is sensitive to the perception that it seems to be sacrificing work to serve a metropolitan elite agenda,” he said. “But if you look at the expert testimony of the International Energy Agency, the International Monetary Fund, the University of Oxford – not radicals, but main thinkers – they say you are creating more jobs by investing in clean infrastructure.”

Indeed, to make the need for sustained investment in fossil fuels so important for the job and argue that moving away from fossil fuels will harm jobs, and that the economy is a classic topic of discussion that the fossil fuel industry has used for decades to climate action stop.

It is also used in the United States by the fossil fuel industry and its political and media allies to skew public opinion and thwart the Biden administration’s ambitious climate agenda.

There is still a chance that the UK can reverse its decision

Ed Davey of the British Liberal Democratic Party wrote a letter urging Alok Sharma, the British climate lord tsar, to resign if Prime Minister Johnson did not revoke his decision to approve the mine.

Sharma, who will help lead COP 26 later this year, is reportedly seduced by the decision to open the mine.

After all, the COP 26 summit is where the UK is meant to encourage other countries to phase out fossil fuels. This will be much harder to do if the UK itself only approves the development of a brand new coal mine at home.

But Crosland said it was possible all of this could convince Prime Minister Boris Johnson to reverse the course. “We’ve seen the one thing Johnson is prone to this kind of pressure, when he reads the signs,” Crosland said.

“If Johnson believes the Cumbria mine will jeopardize the UK’s prospects from COP 26 with some sort of credibility intact, then I think the chances are the government will change its plans,” he said.