Coal mines

I read in yesterday's Guardian, over the breakfast bread and cheese, of the government declining to intervene in the matter of a big new coal mine in Cumbria, given planning approval by the Cumbrian authorities in March. I put the question of why it has taken six months to come to the boil again to one side.

The question of interest today, is which of the party leaders about to offer themselves to the country would have anything of interest to say about this, given due notice? A contest which should perhaps be handicapped according to each leader's briefing resources, so that Johnson, with a huge team of briefers at his beck and call, is not so given too big an advantage.

I list various points for, against and procedural below, without presuming to come to any opinion.

The new mine would create a lot of jobs in an area which I dare say could do with them. But would true born Englishmen take these jobs, or would we be looking to the harder workers from eastern Europe to take them?

Jobs which, in the past, have been both dangerous and unhealthy.

The new mine would displace a lot of oil and gas which would otherwise have to be imported - and paid for by selling off chunks of London to foreigners - the very people that Brexiteers love to hate. Of whom there are near 300,000 in Cumbria - a fact that takes Bing and I about 10 seconds to unearth. But maybe they hate London and Londoners even more.

Burning coal is one of the most efficient ways of generating greenhouse gases known to man. And so burning a lot of it is clearly a bad thing in its own right and is not going to do much either for our ambition to set a green example to the rest of the world.

We have lots of coal burning power stations, with many years of life left in them, which we cannot yet afford to walk away from. Burning our own black coal is at least better than burning cheap brown coal from Poland instead. No idea how much truth there is in this one. A punt.

The £165 million to be spent on coal mine would be better spent on windmills. For which see reference 1. I have not done the sums on whether coal gives better bang for buck in narrow energy manufacturing terms. If I get bored later today, I might turn up the report noticed at reference 1 and see what I can glean from that.

Have they checked out heritage, wildlife and environmental concerns? Does the mine involve the destruction of a 5,000 year old burnt offering site? The destruction of an important colony of bat-eared moles? Disturbance of the course of the River Cotter?

Is this a matter which ought to be left to Cumbria County Council? Given that it is all too likely to focus on the short term economic impact on its own people - and the rest of the world can look after itself. Or is a new coal mine strategic enough that Government, if not Parliament, should muscle in?

PS 1: is there any way that the people who build whopping great nuclear submarines in Barrow-in-Furness could be turned over to building windmills? Perhaps using some of the £165 million so to do. Or that any of the disused mines in the mountains of the Lake District could be turned over to plastic dumps as a quid pro quo. For which last, see reference 2.

PS 2: important thought the following morning: making policies about this sort of thing can be a useful simplification. If government lays down a central policy, possibly about new coal mines, all we have to do is follow the protocols therein. No need to think at all. This won't always give the right answer, but it will always give an answer, without huge expenditure of time or effort, which can, sometimes, be more important than always being in the right.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/10/windy-hope.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/10/carbon-sink.html.