The U.K.’s first new deep coalmine in 30 years will not be allowed to go ahead after a landmark ruling in the High Court. The Guardian has more.
On Friday morning, Justice Holgate ruled that plans to build the facility in Whitehaven, Cumbria, would not proceed, in what campaigners called a “victory for the environment”.
New fossil fuel projects are thought to be on shakier legal ground after the precedent set by a landmark supreme court decision that quashed planning permission granted for an oil drilling well at Horse Hill on the Weald in Surrey. The judgment found the climate impact of burning coal, oil and gas must be taken into account when deciding whether to approve projects. This was the first court decision on plans for a new fossil fuel development since the Horse Hill ruling.
Holgate agreed with Friends of the Earth that Michael Gove, when he was Secretary of State for Levelling Up, acted unlawfully in accepting a claim by West Cumbria Mining (WCM) that the mine would be “net zero” and have no impact on the country’s ability to meet the emissions cuts required under the Climate Change Act 2008, because it was relying on offsetting through purchasing carbon credits from abroad. U.K. Government policy does not allow for reliance on international offsets to meet carbon budgets.
The new Labour Government this year withdrew its support from the Whitehaven mine in the Cumbria legal case. Lawyers acting for Angela Rayner, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, said there had been an “error in law” in the decision to grant planning permission for the mine in December 2022.
Withdrawing its defence against two legal challenges by Friends of the Earth and South Lakes Action on Climate Change, the Government instead informed the court that the planning permission should be quashed. The case proceeded as the developer of the mine, WCM, still wanted to defend the original decision to approve it.
Emissions from the burning of the coal from the proposed Whitehaven mine were not included in the developer’s climate assessment.
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The only way to make quality new steel from iron ore is to use metallurgical coal in a blast furnace. That is what the Cumbrian mine was going to produce. All of the electric arc furanaces just recycle steel. That’s not a bad thing, steel is infinatly recyclable, but with India, China and others developing the world needs lots of new steel.
Do the greens want to ban new steel production world wide? Of course that’s not going to happen. The price of steel would go through the roof. Banning the Cumbrian coal will achieve absolutely nothing. Those contracts will be fulfilled elsewhere. Britain is now the only major economy that cannot produce its own new steel from ore. We rely on imports for this strategic material.
Even if you think that CO2 is a problem, the amount produced by making steel is very small. To stop oil and coal being used for fuel is one thing, but to stop them being used in industrial processes is stupid beyond belief.
While the brain dead greens celebrate, good jobs have been lost in a poor area that desperately needed them, all for an ideology which has just about become a religion.
Well said!
Ehh … there are no blast furnaces left in the UK. Which means high quality steel has to be imported, most likely (guess of mine) from India or China, thus causing higher CO₂ emissions as the stuff not only needs to be produced but also transported for thousands of miles. But that’s of no concern for fiends of the earth/ UK section. Their task is to destroy as much of Britain as they can. Other problems are for other people to worry about.
Afterthought: Why is this country governed by people who hate it and why are they allowed to jail those who don’t?
That bloody nails it.
They work hard, and do well at university, then they find that their Arts, Humanities and Social Science degrees aren’t the magic wand to an impressive, well paid job.
I think that for now there are a couple in Scunthorpe making special steel, but they will probably be gone soon as well.
They’re supposed to be ‘replaced’ by electric arc furnaces in December 2025 (as announced November last year). Like other Net Zero lunacies, this may not actually happen. But this doesn’t make the plan any less idiotic.
Apparently they are only good for recycling steel. They can’t make it from scratch. I don’t think that they can get the required heat from electricity, but I don’t know.
A religion for the useful idiots but mainly the biggest tax payer looting scam in human history. Eliminating coal and oil means they can pretend so-called ‘renewables’ can fill the gap and Miliband, Stark, Julia King, Dale Vince, Gummer and the rest of the bullshitting parasitic green blob who clearly all have fat financial skin in the game can fill their boots. I’d like to know what Justice Holgate has his money invested in too and who he’s friends with.
Telling quote (from Neil Toru, lawyer for
enemies of mankindobjectsexuals fancying huge inanimate stone ballsfriends of the earth — quite difficult getting these meaningless lablels right …):This mine should never have been given permission in the first place. […] it harms the UK’s international reputation on climate.
That is, all our globalist climate cronies would have been really pissed off if this development had been allowed to go ahead. And for the local people, well,
The UK government now needs to ensure communities right across country aren’t left with choice of high-carbon jobs or no jobs.
[Dr Doug Parr, chief Greenpeace ‘scientist’ in the UK]
they’re f***ed. But with our international reputation now restored, that’s certainly not our problem!
“The judgment found the climate impact of burning coal, oil and gas must be taken into account”. Doesn’t this assume that there is an actual impact when this is far from being proven to be the case. The law seems to be based on an assumption rather than established fact which somehow weakens it in my eyes.
That’s a supreme court judgement and it’s not only obviously based on assumptions which aren’t necessarily true (as you already observed) but it also mandates double-counting of these emissions: Whoever uses coal or oil in an industry application is already being held responsible for any CO₂ emissions caused by that.
It is indeed based on an assumption, but we have forced ourselves in law to reduce emissions based on that assumption, and we can be sued right left and centre for breaking that law. —-It is beyond parody but that is where we are now. We have a Political Class that agrees with the WEF and UN that the “lifestyles of the affluent middle class is unsustainable” and who better to have in charge for the purposes of lowering living standards than the insidious Ed Miliband who I thought we had gotten rid of years ago?
We have a Political Class that don’t know what they are doing.
Most of what government does is infrastructure projects, technical, man management, business, outsourcing, and they don’t have the knowledge or experience to perform even adequately in a very international, competitive environment.
There is no law involved here. Just some guy sitting on a ‘court’ created Tony Blair to take over a task so far handled by the house of lords, presumably because stuffing this court with his cronies was easier as ‘that other party’ had no rights to appoint members if it, who’s making obviously nonsensical statements like “oil refineries cause road traffic” (cause and effect inverted) and inventing absurd demands supposedly following from that, specifically, holding operators of oil wells repsonsible for so-called emissions someone else is legally responsible for.
That’s not even legislating from the bench, it’s phantasizing from bench and the solution to this problem is someone standing up and pointing out that this guy isn’t wearing any clothes (in the sense of the well-known supposedly well-dressed emperor) but is just abusing a position created to be abused in this way to issue random political diktats par ordre his most eminent Tonyness he believes people have to obey to. He’ll continue to believe that until someone has the balls to reply to this with “I won’t.”
These people are nothing but a bunch of second-line Canutes who really believe they have to power to stop the tide by issueing paper decrees and who’ll ‘fine’ the tide for as long it doesn’t play ball.
The judgment found the climate impact of burning coal, oil and gas must be taken into account.
This judgement amounts to a seriously peverse reverse-subsidy. It intentionally creates a competitive disadvantages for UK businuesse in the UK (and global) market which will economically benefit their overseas competitors.
What kind of crazy policy is this? Why are British institutions seeking to harm British businesses in favour of foreign competitors? Secretly control by a cabal of their most devoted enemies? And not exactly secretly.
You say —Disadvantage the UK and benefit overseas. ——- When you check back over the history of the climate nonsense you see time after time UN and WEF people standing at podiums making pronouncements about wealth. Probably one of the most famous is “One has to free oneself from the illusion that climate policies are environmental policies anymore. We redistribute the words wealth de facto by climate policy” —Edenhoffer (UN)
from the start climate has always just been the tool and the very plausible excuse for the political agenda which amounts to Supranational Socialism, as Margaret Thatcher alluded to in her book Statecraft.
We’re being lead by donkeys.
Not donkeys. Donkeys are nice, hard-working, long-suffering and downtrodden, like us proles.
We’re being led by Lampreys, Spiders and Tapeworms, more like.
I will not have you slander spiders like that. Spiders act in the open and kill pests. They have full intent. Spiders are great.
Let’s just be honest and call a spade a spade. Or in this case, a c**t. They’re all c**ts.
Yes I like spiders. Miliband Starmer and Reeves are more like a hyena’s. Every time a wildlife program comes on the telly my wife will say “Oh no here comes the hyenas to kill all the Lion Cubs” Just as Miliband Reeves and Starmer are coming to kill all the pensioners.
“in accepting a claim by West Cumbria Mining (WCM) that the mine would be “net zero” and have no impact on the country’s ability to meet the emissions cuts required under the Climate Change Act 2008, because it was relying on offsetting through purchasing carbon credits from abroad.”
Yet the reality is that the UK government is doing exactly this. We are importing wood chips to burn at Drax. We have exported our prime steel production to China but will import it as if this means anything to world zero targets.
Hypocrisy off the scale and the judges are either thick as planks or corrupt.
I suspect this is somewhat of a ‘fake headline’? The court had no other option as no defence was offered. The headline should indicate that the Govt offered no defence..not that it matters that much. The Britain of past has faded and will continue to fade. Language, culture, art, education, media, journalism, health and justice, all hollowed out into mere hulks of what they once were. It will continue I suspect, one will struggle to recognise the Britain of 2029 compared to today..and I hazard a guess that Deagles population forecast of a UK for 2025 may not be far off the mark given the current UK/USA actions in relation to a country in Eastern Europe, may not be far off the mark…..15 million people…(a 77.1% reduction). How many of Stomer’s cabinet are members of the Fabian Society, ..perhaps basic bread and butter Eugenists
The case was defended by the company which wanted to operate the mine.
The Scientists and Engineers have probably given up.
You can lead a horse to water ….
Banning Coal & Steel Kills Britain
Where do we find these people.
The whole thing is a scam and a money spinner. There is no truth in Net Zero but oh boy is there a lot of money sloshing around. Take Carbon Credits for example, a country can produce as much CO2 as they like providing they pay other countries lots of dosh for Carbon Credits. It doesn’t make the world cleaner, it just makes some people richer.
Closing down mines, nuclear stations, gas stations and converting the best steel producers into tin can recyclers does not make the world cleaner. All that it achieves is shifting clean production across the world to dirty production and then shipping the product all the way back across the world. We make the world a dirtier place and also end up with far inferior steel. It’s the equivalent of throwing your weeds into next doors garden and claiming you made the street a lot tidier.
This is no surprise at all since we are forcing ourselves in law to reduce emissions of CO2. Some would call that “saving the planet” and others would call it dumb. But since nothing we do in this country will have the slightest effect on the planet overall all we can really conclude is that it is DUMB. Even Tony Blair whose government gave us the Climate Change Act in 2008 has said Net Zero will have no effect on global climate.
—–But even if the claims of the IPCC and climate alarmists are remotely true about what is going to happen to climate, which remember is all based on models that have so far all been wrong, then what possible saving of the planet can a small country like the UK achieve by rushing to be Net Zero in only 5 and a quarter years from now (2030), while in the meantime huge countries like China India Malaysia Brazil etc etc are all burning coal and emitting more CO2 than we have produced since the beginning of time? The answer is that what we do here will have no effect. So then we must ask the question “Then Why do it”, and the answer is actually very simple ——It isn’t about the climate and it never was. It is about the UK getting rid of the finite resource of fossil fuels because we were the first country to benefit and become prosperous by using them ——In other words ECO SOCIALISM. This is why your Prime Minister prefers Davos to Westminster. Because he agrees with the UN and WEF that we should lower our living standard by pretending to save the planet.
It may have been a landmark legally but certainly in the UK not a landmark politically. The current government isn’t going to be pushing hydrocarbons whatever happens. If we ever get a sane government again, they will have to repeal the Climate Change Act anyway.
It will need to be in their manifesto, so the Lords will have to allow it to pass!
That’s if the Lords are still there.
Good point
It’s not specifically mentioned in the Reform policy document but it does say “scrap Net Zero”.
But there is zero chance of Reform getting into government
Leading figures of the liberal party will have been convinced of this wrt Labour in the past. Unless the leaders of the conversative and laborious party (both branches) stage a coup, which is theoretically possibly but IMHO, very unlikely, as their uniformed diversity hires aren’t going to be willing to do anything which might endanger themselves, they’re on the way out with a bang most people will experience as a wimper as they’re simply maldapted to the 21st century: They keep fighting 1980s battles against imaginary foes – Coal must overed! Greenpeace to save the planet! Legalize gay sex! etc – and their best (and pretty much only) idea about the internet is “Can’t we shut this bloody thing down again?”
If you don’t learn, you won’t hang around.
I don’t share your optimism but I hope I’m wrong
Re: Greenpeace. Do you remember? You probably don’t.
From Heroic men in tiny boats putting themselve in harms way to Save the Whales! to Shady lawyers in tailored suits splitting legalese hairs to ruin Wales! is quite a downfall.
Oh well, there’s another 400 or so jobs down the pan. Plus the upgrade of the working museum that comprises the Cumbrian Coast railway line, which with the mine had a business case.
Oh, and billions in tax revenue, too, since the coal (which is for steel making, not just burning) was largely for export.
But we’ve got plenty of money now that those pesky old people are going to freeze this winter.
“the climate impact of burning coal, oil and gas must be taken into account when deciding whether to approve projects.”. Er, what climate impact? There’s zero evidence of CO2 driving climate (which, BTW, is an average of weather with 1 data point being 30 years).
Why cannot ordinary plebs launch court action against Milliband’s policies ? Surely we have human rights too ?
I get the sense that people in positions of power only consider their decisions one or maybe two layers deep… Never the 3rd let alone 5th order consequences… Poisoning children with nitrous fumes due to rise in dieseaseals in cities due to the high charging of CO2 through vehicle tax?