China's radical approach to renewable energy

We hear a lot about how China is still building coal-fired power stations so climate change can’t be stopped. So let’s add some context to that.

- Maddie Evans, via email

We don't have coal mines in the UK because Margaret Thatcher decided they were uneconomic, and we don’t have coal power stations because we wanted to reduce acid rain and carbon emissions, so it goes.

The tragedy wasn’t closing the mines, but the uncontrolled rush to close them that created a generation of unemployed miners.

Coal mining was hard, dirty and dangerous work. Miners had higher levels of industrial diseases and shorter lives because coal mines released pollution and dust, and often contaminated groundwater.

Coal miners didn’t want their children to follow them down the pit (although they usually did), they wanted them to have well-paid surface jobs.