Coal for Christmas: has the UK changed its energy policy?

Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove has approved the UK’s first deep coal mine in three decades, a move that opponents say will send the country’s green credentials “up in smoke”. 

Gove “gave the green light” for a new mine to be created in Whitehaven, Cumbria this week. The £165m project will create “about 500 new jobs in the region and produce 2.8m tonnes of coking coal a year, largely for steelmaking”, said The Guardian.

But the mine will also produce “an estimated 400,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions a year”, which is the equivalent of “putting 200,000 cars on the road”, said the paper. 

The government has insisted that the mine falls within its own climate legislation, which requires the UK to reach net zero emissions by 2050, “as operations will shut down by 2049”. But ministers are now “braced” for “an almost certain” legal challenge to the plans by critics who say the decision risks breaching the target and flies in the face of the UK’s climate commitments. 

What did the papers say?

The level of “churn” at the top of British politics this year, which has seen three different Conservative prime ministers, has “obscured how much the world has changed”, wrote James Forsyth in The Times. “Inflation, war, lockdown’s aftershock: these have upended our assumptions about everything from security to supply chains,” said Forsyth.

It has prompted an update of the UK’s integrated review – essentially the country’s national strategy – to “reflect these new dynamics”, and the government is likely to publish it in the spring. “But perhaps the more important long-term shift is decoupling: the drive to reduce dependence on China and build resilience into our supply chains”.

Britain is now “beginning to adjust to this new world”, says Forsyth. Indeed, the “official argument” for the need for a new coal mine “relies heavily” on the need for domestic steel production, which requires coking coal, and that it is “better to produce both here than rely on importing coal from countries such as Russia and steel from China”.

But it seems that the “new British coal won’t in fact be used for the production of British steel, or at least not much of it”, wrote Cat Rutter Pooley in the Financial Times. “The sulphur content is apparently too high for British Steel, while the expected lifespan of the blast furnaces at Tata Steel’s Port Talbot works limit its likely demand for coking coal to perhaps little more than a decade,” she wrote. “A security of supply argument just doesn’t stack up.”  

Article source: https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/environment/958837/coal-for-christmas-has-the-uk-changed-its-energy-policy