The government has promised a decision on the Woodhouse colliery on or before 7th July so by the time you read this we may be celebrating its defeat or working out our next steps. Meanwhile just last week the Committee on Climate Change issued its latest report that said while UK targets are fine our actions aren't matching up, and Lord Deben (who was Conservative Minister for the Environment John Gummer) said “I’m seriously worried that we are not moving fast enough to avert real catastrophe.” In particular the committee again rejected proposals for a new coal mine in Cumbria.
In fact Lord Deben is correct and we are already seeing real catastrophes – In our winter of 2019-20 the worst ever Australian wildfires were hitting the headlines with numerous fatalities and thousands of homes destroyed. Last summer there were fatal floods in Germany and Belgium, again causing nearly 200 deaths. In the global south the death toll is much higher from extreme weather events and they will continue to suffer the most from our lack of action.
When the report was issued, Caroline Lucas Green MP commented, “We know that we cannot reach net-zero without keeping fossil fuels in the ground. And yet in the past month, this Government has greenlit the Jackdaw gas field in Scotland, a gas development in Surrey, and appears on the cusp of approving a climate-wrecking new coal mine in Cumbria – every project a giant weight dragging us further and further behind.”
We know that some politicians would be against the coal mine if only they dared to say so. The ludicrous promise of 500 jobs is appealing until you set it against the damage it will do when we, locally, suffer some catastrophic weather event, or the number of jobs that could be created if we only did as the climate change committee suggested and made some serious inroads into retrofitting insulation at scale, street by street, house by house, which would bring help with the price of heating as well as help to protect us all against extreme weather events.
For my ward and for many others in Cumbria the new HUG and HUG2 grant schemes are vital to providing help to houses which are heated by oil – or even coal, but again, bidding schemes pit council against council in a kind of warm-off competition. One limit to their effectiveness will be the lack of skilled installers. Where are the training programmes?
Even the steel industry doesn’t want Cumbrian coking coal, it wants green hydrogen. Training installers and insulating houses might not make sexy headlines but it’s what we, the people, need.
Cllr. Jill Perry
