The death of coal, held to be the eldest and ugliest of the three fossil fuel siblings, has long been exaggerated. While oil and natural gas needed to be tolerated for some time in the ‘energy transition’, dirty coal – responsible for soot, smog and respiratory disease – was already beyond the pale for many decades in most Western developed countries.
The latest twist in this tale of a death exaggerated starts with a Guardian story on Monday last week. In his trip to China – the world’s largest coal consumer by far, and with no let-up in sight – the UK’s Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero “is hoping to shape a new global axis in favour of climate action along with China and developing countries, to counter Donald Trump’s abandonment of green policies in the US”. Then, on Saturday, the Daily Mail reported that Miliband “admits his solar panels bought for English schools and hospitals are Chinese and may be made using coal”.
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Trump common sense. Something that is missing in the Miliband brain.
Size?
Brain?
What brain?
AAAAAHHH buuut does Milliband actually have a brain? If so it has not seen much use.
“I think as part of the national energy emergency which President Trump has declared we’ve got to keep every plant open. And if there have been units at a coal plant that have been shut down, we need to bring those back on…”
…God Bless America – Energy-philistines, deviants and traitors blew most of Britain’s cathedrals of coal to smithereens years ago.
Reliable, affordable and practical 24/7/365 energy ditched in favour of the will o’ the wisp of breezes and sunbeams. Hostage not to hydrocarbons, but to British weather.
All to save a planet that’s perfectly capable of saving itself. The trace atmospheric gas carbon dioxide is humanity’s friend, not the planet’s enemy.
Meanwhile Britain’s Energy-Emergency looms ever nearer, all to pander to a fake climate-emergency / crisis / armageddon / apocalypse (delete whichever clichés most bored with hearing).
Kommissar Miliband Must Fall.
I’d love to be a fly on the way when he reads things like this. Although I think he seriously believes green energy is going to be cheap.
Great article. Coal – one of the greatest gifts from nature and one of the most important and clean fuels to use.
Make Britain Great Again.
Dig up coal. We have hundreds of years in supply.
We need to think up something that worked like MAGA. MUKGA doesn’t work, or does it? Sounds vaguely Indian.
But sadly no remaining power plants which burn coal. Although presumably Drax could be restored to coal burning and end the ridiculous importing of Canadian wood chips which decimates forests and consumes diesel in transportation.
The Miliband brothers represent all that is wrong with the left. Grasping hypocrites who exist only due to other peoples taxes.
David is paid absurd sums to chair a gov funded NGO that is simply a tax filtration scheme, and Ed surfs the climate bs wave – the ultimate waste of peoples hard earned cash.
And just to spell out, both grasping hypocrites are fruitcakes of Marxist loins – fathered by LSE sociology professor Ralph (“Adolphe”) Miliband.
And in true spirit of do as I say not as I do, Planet Saver Miliband Minor last year supported re-opening of Doncaster airport:
https://www.edmiliband.org.uk/news/2024/07/30/update-on-doncaster-airport/
Don’t forget that Milibrain is MP for Doncaster North, a constituency with very many ex Coal Miners.
Interesting that amongst the Uniparty-Lab promises before the 2024 General Election were a promise to pay back billions of pounds stolen by the Uniparty- Tories from the Mineworkers Pension Scheme. And also to launch an Inquiry into the “Battle of Orgreave”, during the 1984-5 Miner’s Strike.
Needless to say, the latter promise has evaporated, but in one of the only promises Stŭrmer actually kept, ex-Minworkers who are still alive got a very well deserved 32% increase in their pensions this January!
Unfortunately, this largesse did not extend to the parallel Coal Management pension scheme’s similarly stolen funds, which includes all the lady canteen workers, nurses, typist etc as well as managers and technical experts. Not even Milibrain cares a hoot about them!
The Millibands really are the epitome of oxygen thieves.
I understand daddy was a Communist lover, maybe explains why Ed wants to decimate our industries and support Red China
Hasn’t fossil fuels saved the whale? No longer need to kill whales for their oil for lighting. Cheap electricity means cheap lighting. No need for whale oil and its use in lighting.
And in a similar vein if the treasonous bar stewards now running / ruining the country have their way and destroy the farming industry we won’t even be able to produce tallow for our candles.
I won’t be installing any solar panels.
I couldn’t possibly condone purchasing a product made by slave labour in a country which uses coal to produce the demon CO2.
I’m feeling incredibly virtuous
If you read TCW today there is an article that makes a case showing solar panels are possibly causing global warming! (They absorb radiation which otherwise could be relected back into space).
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/is-co2-a-villain-or-a-scapegoat/
The article referred to above.
That is probably why they are creating “clouds” (using the residues captured from power station “scrubbers” apparently). Does anyone have more details on that allegation?
All very good information, and increasingly widely understood. So, how will we make any changes happen? Print huge ‘Made in China’ labels and stick them on school solar panels? As well as plastering the Staff Room with them. And every other gathering space of the collective left
As hux so politely puts it, the battle we need to fight will not come via the ballot box. A lot of people need to be reprogrammed to regain their freedom, and not live off the state as serfs. The State knows that, hence their many strategies to divide and rule – as long as taxpayers can be milked hard enough
Hardliner and Hux are both right – but if memory serves right, communism didn’t relatively-peacefully collapse in Eastern Europe through the ballot box either…
‘communism didn’t collapse via the ballot box’…which is exactly my point.
The likes of Kneel and Millibrain and the rest of the Davos wannabes are not going to give up on their Nut Zero ambitions and until the 90% WTFU things can only get worse. At some point there will be an awakening but I fear real poverty will have to kick in before this occurs and at which point there will be blood on the streets. Most probably any uprising will centre around racial tensions and anti-establishment anger will be generalised. If I am wrong then there can only follow a slow slide into a modern feudalism.
Grim.
I don’t think that you are wrong.
Thanks H. Excellent post.
If we stuck Made in China on every item of clothing, electrical equipment, faux this and faux that, treasure and tat, in our homes, schools, shops, businesses and so on infinitum, even Ed might be shocked at our total national dependence on Chinese coal. Then again, he might not.
“… as long as taxpayers can be milked hard enough”
There is a (metaphorical) ticking time bomb that will ensure that, if things don’t change, it won’t go on for ever: the UK State Pension:
https://youtu.be/9RRM-XXRL20?si=jy-G-nFU4yxgdAf8
‘Made in China by slave labour’ would look better and be more accurate. Two Tier is going to order his underlings to vote down a Lords amendment to the energy bill banning slave labour products from public buildings.
This graph tells you all you need to know re Baby Miliband’s insanity…
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had clean coal powered steam trains again, puffing along reconstituted branch lines?
I’d vote for that.
A real pleasure to wake to an article such as this! Sure as eggs is eggs oil and coal will be resurrected for the benefit of society. The timely ressurection of mental institutions will be needed as well, for the housing of Mad Ed and his like.
Piano wire and lampposts are much cheaper and more effective.
Although, strangely, lampposts are disappearing from the streets of many of our cities, at the moment.
I wonder what that will do for crime and accident statistics?
Very helpful information about the improvements in pollutioin control from coal power stations. This should be more widely known. It would also be helpful to give qualitative and qualitative information about how the cleaned-up emissions compare with other generating fuels, what further progress is likely soon and just what evidence is there of continuing damage from the remaining small amounts of pollutants.
These issues need to be brought to public attention so a debate can be had. Ditto for oil and gas energy sources.
I wonder how soon we could re-equip Drax or rebuild the stations Cameron-Clegg were so pleased to physically destroy.
I wrote this piece when I was arguing on-line with ecomentalists back in 2017 ……
Without having to import any coal the UK had 48 years supply to power all our electricity needs. Plenty of time for technology to invent a clean and cheap new source (nuclear is not clean).
Carbon capture is unnecessary as many scientists believe CO2 only has a small effect on climate change. By all means filter out the carbon particulates to ensure cleaner air. Relying on the very expensive, subsidised wind and solar in the UK when the sun doesn’t shine, or the wind is non-existent or too windy is putting our future energy needs in jeopardy particularly as some climate experts are predicting a cooling period due to reduced solar activity.
Japan is building 48 new low emissions coal fired power stations. http://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2017-01-31/japan-coal-power-plants/8224302
My memory may be biased but was it not UK that was leading in the development of filters for coal-fired power stations – in the good old days?
The problem with socialists is that every event must conform to their insane ideology, if events don’t fit in they are either ignored or manipulated. Any dissent is crushed under their ideological jackboot.
Thankfully things are changing but we have another 4 years of these crackpots!
The world’s largest coal power consumers in Asia such as China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam now no longer need to face down what the then senior economic advisor to the Government of India Arvind Subramaniam called carbon imperialism a decade ago
Good. The greater the resistance the better.
“Dirty” these days refers to C02, so any fossil fuel is “dirty”. The hypocrisy being it takes far more “dirty” energy to produce the apparatus and back-up for “clean” energy than just using “dirty” energy and cutting out the “clean” middle man.
Modern coal plants are not only very efficient – coal price being less volatile, and working continuously to provide base load – but very clean too with new burning techniques and flues fitted with scrubbers and filters.
If the scrubbers and filters do their work properly there are residues. One of the geo-engineering speakers said that these residues are what is being “sprayed”/”trailed” in our skies to reproduce a “volcanic ash effect”. Is this the case? Does anybody know more?
To this date, the Egyptian military mainly exists because of US subsidies for it. Which means the western imperialist Eisenhower won a fight with other imperalists over a US client state by exploiting the fact that the British strategy of two world wars – destroy Germany at any cost – had left the country with huge debts in the USA whose industry had manufactured a lot of the military hardware and ammunition used (or wasted) for that.
This is also a repeating pattern in British postwar history — whenever British politicians do something somebody really doesn’t like, another government bonds offensive takes place and the British politicians in question than hastily step back into the line. One could calls this lizzing on their trusses (as in falling on their swords).
Interesting article but a 30kg bag of coal can only be used once whereas a battery 100’s of times and then recycled into a new one. The sort of argument that DS exposes in much of the ‘green’ propaganda. It would be an interesting exercise to go more deeply in comparing the environmental and cost advantages and disadvantages of coal and renewable electrical power.
Interesting article but a 30kg bag of coal can only be used once whereas a battery 100’s of times and then recycled into a new one.
That’s a stupid comparison because no battery is ever a source of energy. It can only be employed for time-shifting use of electricity generated in some other way. For the given example, provided three metric tons of coal are available, the battery can be used for time-shifting the use of the potential energy contained in 30kg of coal 100 times. That’s not even a zero-sum game but actually worse because some of the electricity used to charge the battery cannot be recovered from it.
Further, recycling batteries doesn’t work by pointing at a battery and commanding “Recycle thyself!” This needs energy, too, which can never be recovered. This means the battery keeps getting more expensive over time while a 100 already available 30kg sacks of coal won’t.
Someone correct me if I am wrong but as I understand it that the lithium batteries cannot be recycled. Just like the wind turbine blades and solar panels.
Lithium batteries, like almost anything, can be partly “recycled”, at enormous cost and using lots of energy.
Which is why the parallel “Zero Waste” campaign is yet another crock of lies and magical thinking.
Can such a battery be recycled? Can you provide more details? (I thought they had to go to landfill.)
When it comes to coal, reopen house fire places and Make Britain Grate Again.
Marvellous reading so much common sense.
Moribund is not only using slave labour in China. The silly man does not care that The 500kg batteries are an environmental nightmare, using children mining for rare earth minerals/metals in the Congo. Lithium production is a foul process. Diesel and Petrol cars are without doubt cleaner cleaner.
For goodness sake Mr Doshi can you stop talking common sense you’re frightening people!
Remember Drax was lower CO2 when burning coal.
Just shows how ignorant are our policy makers
Saying we have ended coal use on the basis of reducing C02 and being more ecological is wrong. The Drax power station, which was fuelled by coal, is now fuelled by wood pellets which output at least as much C02 as coal and is resulting in the destruction of forests worldwide. Instead of using our native coal reserves we are shipping wood pellets from America, Canada and France with the extra wastage in transport costs. The wrong logic used to justify this on ecological grounds is that new trees are to be planted to replace those cut down for being chipped. In fact, the foreign countries where the wood chips are sourced are not committed to an equal level of re-planting and even if they were, it would take at least a decade for newly planted trees to equal the C02 absorption of those cut down. Wood pellets are not any more ecological than coal, and with the new technologies coal is actually less polluting. Our stupid past and present governments are deluding themselves that the wood pellet fuel provides a benefit and are wasting our taxes on providing grants and the cost of conversion from coal. Another element in our rising fuel costs.
BTW C02 is NOT a pollutant and human emissions of it have never been proven to be a significant driver of climate change. Net-zero is madness, and Ed Miliband is a delusional nutcase.