A dirty black hole
A dirty black hole
From Wales to Colombia, the scourge of opencast coal mining is being driven by our continued dependence on this dirtiest of fossil fuels, writes Kelvin Mason
Kelvin Mason
August 2013
In October 2007, George Monbiot looked at a green hilltop in Merthyr Tydfil where a massive new opencast coal mine was planned and warned of ‘the new coal age’. ‘One thought kept clanging through my head,’ he wrote. ‘If this is allowed to happen, we might as well give up now.’
Covering 367 hectares, Ffos-y-fran was to be a huge mine, involving the excavation of 11 million tonnes of coal by 2025 and so responsible for at least 25 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. Monbiot’s article was one spur for a campaign of direct action against the project, in which climate justice activists joined residents opposing the impact on the local environment. The campaign reached its peak in 2009 with a week-long climate action camp of around 500 people in Merthyr Tydfil.
Four years later, mining at Ffos-y-fran is in full swing. It is is just one of a number of new generation opencast coal mines planned for Wales. Over the formerly green hilltop from Ffos-y-fran, near the small town of Rhymney, the same Miller Argent consortium proposes another mine – in effect a further huge extension to the existing one, as residents see it. If Nant Llesg receives planning permission, it will mine up to nine million tonnes of coal, emitting more than 20 million tonnes of carbon dioxide when burned.
Meeting demand
Developers such as Miller Argent claim they are merely meeting demand – and, in the case of Ffos-y-fran, reclaiming large areas of derelict land from earlier mining activity ‘at no cost to the public purse’. According to the International Energy Agency, some 41 per cent of world electricity generation is fuelled by coal. In the UK we still depend on coal for 30 per cent our of electricity production, rising to more than 40 per cent in winter periods of peak demand. In 2011, we burned 41.8 million tonnes of coal in power stations.
More:
http://www.redpepper.org.uk/a-dirty-black-hole/