Energy not the issue it is often made out to be

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.

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. Coal mines released pollution and dust and often contaminated groundwater. Miners had higher levels of industrial diseases and shorter lives. Coal miners didn’t want their children to follow them down the pit (although they invariably did!), they wanted them to have well paid surface jobs.

Driving the closures through on ideological grounds was an avoidable disaster for whole communities.

Why is China still building coal power stations when coal generation capacity in the G7 and EU has fallen by a third since 2015? Partly because electricity demand is rising as the world decarbonises and, according to the IEA, China is electrifying faster than most, 28 per cent of its energy consumption is now from electricity, compared to 22 per cent in the US or 21 per cent in the EU. China needs to keep the lights on and industry running.