The UK’s planned Cumbria coal mine makes climate goals even more difficult to achieve

The UK is facing strong criticism from climate change scientists and activists for its decision to move ahead with plans to develop the country’s first deep coal mine in 30 years, despite warnings that it could destroy any chance of reaching the country’s climate change goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

In a letter dated 29 January, the Climate Change Committee, an independent body advising the UK government on progress towards emissions targets, said opening the mine would lead to significant increases in annual CO2 emissions from the UK. If the mine can operate by 2049 as currently planned, the committee says the UK’s target of achieving zero net emissions by 2050, which many experts said is not fast enough as it is, will be at risk.

The mine is scheduled to be developed in western Cumbria, a county in northwest England that the Guardian reports “has seen years of layoffs and high unemployment rates” due to the closure of a major chemical plant and the decommissioning of a nuclear facility in the area . The Cumbria County Council, which approved the project, said it did so because it will create jobs in an area of ​​high unemployment, according to the BBC.

But scientists and climate activists criticized the decision to go ahead with the mine.

On February 3, Jim Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, wrote a letter to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, warning that continuing with the plan to open the mine showed “contempt for the future of young people and of nature “and would result in Johnson’s” humiliation “at COP 26, the UN’s annual climate change conference that the United Kingdom is due to host in Glasgow later this year.

Hansen, who is famous for testifying about the science of human-induced warming before the United States Congress in 1998, gave Johnson the option of being part of the changing history of climate change or facing street protests.

“By leading the UK, as a COP host, you have a chance to change the course of our climate trajectory, earning historical accolades for the UK and yourself – or you can keep business almost as usual and be defamed in the Glasgow, London and around the world, ”says Hansen’s letter.

In response to Hansen, the Johnson government said it is leading the fight against global warming by “cutting emissions in more than any major economy so far”, referring to ambitious plans to reduce UK emissions in 68 percent by 2030 compared to 1990 levels, the benchmark agreed by the more than 100 countries that signed the 2016 Paris climate agreement.

“We are already committed to ending the use of coal for electricity by 2025 and ending direct government support to the fossil fuel energy sector abroad,” says the letter.

But if the UK has pledged to end domestic use of coal for electricity by 2025 and end government support for fossil fuel projects abroad, how can it also move forward with the opening of a new coal mine?

Woodhouse Colliery will not be an ordinary coal mine – or so the mining company says

Woodhouse Colliery – the name of the Cumbria mine project, which is operated by West Cumbria Mining – would be the UK’s first new deep coal operating mine in 30 years. The last deep coal mine in operation in North Yorkshire was closed in 2016 – “ending centuries of deep coal mining in Britain”, in the words of a BBC report at the time.

The Woodhouse mine, when opened, would reverse this trend. Will dig up coking coal, also known as metallurgical coal, from under the Irish Sea to make coke, a “form of almost pure carbon” that is used to make steel. The coal from the mine will help supply the steel industry in the UK and Western Europe.

According to West Cumbria Mining, the coal will be “processed at a plant that is a ‘building within a building’ to further minimize the impacts of noise, dust and light”. As a result, the company says the mines are “cleaner, safer to work with and more understanding of the environment. “

In the March 2019 report, the Cumbria City Council said the mine would be carbon neutral – a term that refers to the state of producing net zero carbon dioxide emissions, which is achieved by eliminating the combustion of fossil fuels like coal, or by capturing or offsetting carbon emissions through processes such as planting trees. According to the Cumbria County Council report, coal from the Cumbria mine will replace the need for coal elsewhere, which he says makes it carbon neutral.

But a January 2020 report by Green Alliance, an independent environmental and charity think tank in the UK, poured cold water on the Cumbria mine’s carbon neutral claims. The report argues that, according to basic economic theory, “an increase in the supply of a commodity, such as coal, would reduce the price, leading to increased demand and therefore increased emissions”.

As a result of this increase in demand, the report’s authors claim that the steel industry will have less incentives to use or recycle the coal it uses efficiently. The industry would also be less likely to look for alternative ways to produce steel, such as through the Direct Reduced Iron Process, which uses natural gas – still a fossil fuel, but less polluting than coal.

In defense of the coal mine, the Cumbria County Council also suggested that the coal produced would be used in the UK and the EU, thereby ending emissions from coal imports. But according to the Green Alliance report, the county council says, without evidence, that not having transport emissions will offset emissions produced by coal mining.

The end result, says the Green Alliance, is that Woodhouse Colliery will not be carbon neutral with its plans to extract 2.43 million tons of metallurgical coal per year. This will produce 9 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, a measure of greenhouse gas emissions based on their global warming potential, per year.

And that doesn’t even include emissions from extraction.

The UK government bought the false dichotomy between climate action and jobs

The new mine will be located in County Cumbria, near Whitehaven, one of the UK’s poorest cities, with 14 percent of households having financial difficulties in paying for heating bills in 2018. Therefore, the call for 500 new jobs, that the mining company says Woodhouse Colliery would do production, it is difficult for some local leaders and citizens to ignore (although there is some local opposition).

“But it is not true,” Tim Crosland, director of Plan B, a UK organization that supports taking legal action to fight climate change, told me. Crosland contested that the promise of “a few hundred precarious jobs in an endangered industry” would be worthwhile for the people of Cumbria in the end. “We need good quality sustainable jobs for the future,” added Crosland.

The government fears that canceling the mine is a choice between jobs and environmental concerns, Crosland told me.

“The government is sensitive to the perception that it appears to be sacrificing jobs to serve an agenda for the metropolitan elite,” he said. “But if you really look at the evidence from experts at the International Energy Agency, the International Monetary Fund, the University of Oxford – not radical, but traditional thinkers – they say you create more jobs by investing in clean infrastructure.”

Indeed, framing the need for continued investment in fossil fuels as important for jobs and arguing that abandoning fossil fuels will harm jobs and the economy is a classic point of discussion that the fossil fuel industry has been using for decades to prevent climate action .

It is also being used in the United States by the fossil fuel industry and its political and media allies to distort public opinion and disrupt the Biden government’s ambitious climate agenda.

There is still a chance that the UK will reverse its decision

Ed Davey of the UK Liberal Democratic Party wrote a letter urging Alok Sharma, the UK climate czar, to resign if Prime Minister Johnson does not rescind his decision to approve the mine.

Sharma, who will help lead COP 26 later this year, is furious at the decision to open the mine.

After all, the COP 26 summit is where the United Kingdom intends to urge other nations to eliminate fossil fuels. This will be much more difficult to do if the UK itself approves the development of a new coal mine right there at home.

But Crosland said it is possible that all of this opposition will convince Prime Minister Boris Johnson to reverse the course. “We saw that the only thing Johnson is susceptible to is that kind of pressure, if he reads the signs,” said Crosland.

“If Johnson comes to believe that the Cumbria mine will hurt the UK’s prospects of leaving COP 26 with some sort of credibility intact, then I think there is a chance that the government will change its plans,” he said.