Camp life

Tens of thousands of peoples jobs depend on the UK coal industry. Are all those workers to be thrown out of work and onto the dole just because coal is not environmentally friendly enough? Put peoples jobs before ideals.

Your opinion seems to disregard every person living outside of the UK. Climate change will cause physical harm to millions. Plenty of new jobs can be created from utilising other sources of energy, so it does not mean there will necessarily be more unemployment.

The issue is that the bosses are happy to lay off workers at the drop of a hat, they will try and get away with paying as little redundancy as possible, and they are unwilling to re-train workers to work with different technologies, and all to maximise profits. The same people who are happy to gamble the future of our existence for profit. Do you see who the real enemy is now?

1. Coal in increasingly being imported from places where people work in dangerous conditions of near-slavery.

2. It's not a question of "eco-friendly" versus jobs. It's a question of the future capacity of the planet to support mammalian life -and we're mammals.

3. As others have pointed out, there are many more jobs in renewable electricity generation than in the no-future alternatives.

4. Those jobs include -guess what- EXTRACTING COAL. That's because there is no such thing as;
a COAL-FREE BICYCLE
a COAL-FREE WIND GENNY
a COAL-FREE SOLAR PANEL
Never has been and there is no prospect of any of these things being made without coal in the forseeable future.

Come to think of it, there are no coal-free veg chopping knives, D-locks, or hammers or nails to build toilets with and / or get stolen by the cops.

No steel without coal. Some other fairly useless metals might be made by chopping down all the trees left to make charcoal. Not a very good idea. Recycling and re-manufacturing of steel and other metals should always happen, of course, but that needs a second dose of coal.

5. So THERE'S DEFINITELY A FUTURE FOR A LOCAL COAL INDUSTRY! It should be deep-mined, not opencast, carried on safely by people who're properly paid for it and work in decent conditions, and it should be used near to its point of extraction.

6. What there's NO FUTURE for is BURNING COAL TO PRODUCE ELECTRICITY. That's just fucking stupid, even if the tooth fairy were to come along and make the carbon capture pipedream happen. COAL IS FAR TOO PRECIOUS TO PISS IT AWAY LIKE THAT.

7. Then there's another use for coal which hasn't happened since the 1940s (due to shortage of oil). PLASTICS. Plastics are used willy-nilly to make piles of useless crap which nearly always ends up in landfill. Much of this stuff shouldn't be made at all. Some of it should be made from more suitable and renewable materials. But there are some useful things for which plastics are genuinely the best material, sometimes the only possible one. What are the plastics made from?
OIL, often produced in dangerous and / or exploitative conditions, wastefully shipped round the world, and fast running out. The very limited amount of plastics which actually serve a useful purpose would be much better produced LOCALLY from the coal which is under our feet.

8. That's why Climate Camp is NOT an attack on a sensible coal industry, the few people who still work in it, or the many people and their communities who used to work in it.

9. Maybe we need a RESPONSIBLE COAL FOR THE FUTURE campaign. Just forget the suicidal madness of burning it for electricity generation and the propaganda and myths about carbon capture.