Book by Dave Douglass on end of Coal Mining?

'Coal, Climate Change & The Total Destruction of the British Coal Mining Industry'

David John Douglass

Proud to announce the book will be out next week, easiest to order it from me, e-mail: douglassdavid705@gmail.com, £15 post paid, send me your address, or Friend me on Facebook we can communicate on messenger or whatever. Its important before we all get swept away in a flood of terror and misinformation that the argument for clean coal, and a calm assessment of climate change is heard. Boris’s ‘green deal’ will bankrupt the country and dive down the living standards of the working class on an unprecedented scale. Time to read an alternative view.

Took delivery today of my book Coal, Climate Change and the Total Destruction of the British Mining Industry, so I thought Id inform my friends in case they want to order a signed (or unsigned) copy. £15 post paid, either a cheque made out to Mining Communities Advice Service, co 193 Osborne Ave South Shields NE333BY Tyne and Wear, or bank transfer, will send you those details if you order, ta

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West Cumberland Mining by David J. Douglass

Will This Be The Last Great Fight Of The BRITISH MINERS?

IT SEEMS utterly ridiculous that the plan to open ONE very small coal mine in Whitehaven which will provide essential steel coal for the steel industry, and supply the work starved area with a total of 2500 jobs should have become such a global battleground. Given the ongoing destruction of the rain forests and jungles, the never-ending consumption of trees one would have thought the ecological warriors would have other things to focus on. Yet here we have the Labour Party as a National Institution ensuring that their Shadow cabinet, and Shadow spokespeople on all subjects took every opportunity to use the TV platforms they had been called to discuss China, or the Far East, the NHS or whatever, to dive straight in an stamp and scream about this coal mine.

Labour has made stopping this mine front and centre of its politics, it tells you that its former alleged commitment to the miners and our communities was skin deep at best and sheer hypocrisy in all probability. Now John Kerry, the architect of the global green capitalist revolution and US ambassador for the Environment and Global Warming has an urgent meeting with the Prime Minister and what is top his agenda? US coal mining, strip mining, world drought, starvation, destruction of forests and natural environments???

NO, our wee coal mine. Remember that at present the coal for British steel, comes from coal shipped from the USA, is he telling us this will now stop? Will US coal be prevented from coming here or being shipped to China or anywhere? No its our mine he wants to stop not theirs. Is American steel now going to stop production, and stop using steel coal? No of course not. So now Boris tells Jenrick to overturn his previous decision to leave the question to the Cumberland County Council who have approved it four times. The Government will now set up 'an enquiry' of course Jenrick has already studied in detail the massive reams of evidence considered at Council public enquiries which had dozens of expert witnesses. He already defacto agreed the case for the mine by not pulling the plug before.

So, its hard to know just what 'new evidence' other than Kerry and the Green hysterics, and Labour and Lib Dem's and the Climate Committee all talking out of their backsides; can look at. If he is genuinely looking at this, I hope I get the chance to speak. The 2500 people of Whitehaven who seen the chance for a new tomorrow and desperately needed jobs and new lives will have their lives left dangling over the crevasse of enduring social deprivation and poverty in one of the most socially neglected areas of Britain meantime, while the well-heeled middle class green liberals are doubtless dancing a jig.

If the mine is stopped, will steel imports and production be stopped, will all steel manufacture be stopped? No, it will not, so will any 'emissions' from coke and steel manufacture be saved? Not at all, not one once of c02 or methane will be 'saved' in fact it will increase because of the extra emissions caused by shipping the steel or coal across the Atlantic or from the Baltic or Australia. This is an exercise in self-serving virtue signalling hypocrisy with more than a touch of class hatred.

This may turn out to be the last great fight of the British miners, we ought never to forget whose side our self declared friends fought on.

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Extremists And Deniers by Les May

JUST as I don’t think it is would be particularly helpful to refer to the author of the recent article about the proposed new coal mine in Cumbria as a ‘climate change denier’, I don’t think it is helpful for him to refer to people who have opposed this new mine as ‘climate change extremists’.

Unfortunately the one substantive issue here, the fact that coal is needed as a source of carbon in the production of steel, is lost in this use of emotive language and the desire to turn this into an attack on the Labour party, along with a passing reference to Margaret Thatcher.

Providing jobs does not trump every other consideration. We would think it absurd to argue that we should not reduce the number of plastic bags being used because it will mean fewer jobs manufacturing them or that we should still be burning coal to heat our homes to keep miners in work. In both cases we recognise that there are wider issues to be taken into consideration Ditto the production of coking coal.

At present there is no viable alternative to the use of coal as a source of carbon to combine with the oxygen which is chemically bound to

iron in ores and liberate the free metal. The manufacture of iron and steel is the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions and the dumping of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is the major cause of the increase in global temperatures. A warmer atmosphere and warmer oceans means more energy in the global weather system which is the driver of climate change. Nor is it just about weather; an increase in ocean temperature will cause the water of the oceans to expand resulting in a rise in sea level.

But the present lack of a viable alternative does not mean that we should not be doing all we can to mitigate the effects of this.

Producing coke from coal for use in blast furnaces is a very dirty process with a high potential for producing pollution. It is also wasteful compared with iron smelting by means of, for example, direct gasification of coal. This and similar processes would reduce the demand for coal in the production of iron, and as a consequence reduce both the amount of carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere and the number of mining jobs.

We live in a liberal democracy so anyone who wants to attack the Labour party is free to do so. But I don’t think it is a good idea to gloss over the long term effects of carrying on dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from burning coal when doing so.

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