King Coal

I was immensely critical of the government of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s when she set out to screw the mineworkers and, in particular, the leader of the Mineworkers Union, Arthur Scargill. She wasn't going to be dictated to by the miners as her predecessor, Ted Heath had been. She was determined to shut the mines and let more and more electricity be generated using the all singing, dancing, modern natural gas. She was completely wrong about that just as she was completely wrong about so many other things. This country had - probably, still has - about 400 years supply of coal buried beneath the ground all over the UK. Now we have wasted all our North Sea gas on easy power generation, we have to import from Norway, Russia and so on. That is bad for security and bad for our balance of payments. Current thinking is that we should put much effort into green energy. Trouble is that it does not work all that well. We have found during the recent cold spell our wind farm generators produced almost no electricity because as is often the case in periods of very cold weather, there is no wind. The other daft idea is solar energy. Works fine in Florida and California but not in cloud covered, rainy England. I said 25 years ago that we would have to re-open the coal mines eventually. Now others are saying the same thing.

Money Week tell us that coal is the fuel of the future. Coal is responsible for generating most of the electricity in the world and the proportion is likely to increase. At present we generate about 40% of our electricity using coal - which we now import from Poland, the USA and, apparently, Australia - it is, of course, utter madness. How good for the environment is it to transport dirty, old coal from Australia in order to burn it to generate electricity in England, a country with lots of coal buried under the ground next door to the power stations? But sooner or later, someone will face up to telling us that Thatcher was wrong and that the coal mines must be re-opened. How much will that cost? Unsurprisingly, many pragmatists have come to the conclusion that high energy coal, available in all kinds of stable countries like Australia and the USA is a better bet than oil from the bottom of the sea or from one of the basket case countries of the Middle East or Asia.

You know it makes sense.

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