While following the news from the climate camp at Kingsnorth, and the plans to replace coal with, er, coal, I was prompted to think further about coal in a trip to Hatfield colliery last week.
It re-opened last year and is now producing around 5,000t of power station fuel per day. Very impressive given that not long ago it was, like most Britis mines, written off as a meaningful source of coal.
This availability, or otherwise, of coal also made me think about the other serious consequence of using fossil fuels in industiral quantitie, one that is rarely discussed these days - the fact that they are finite resources. The original green movement of the seventies, and indeed the whole nascent concept of sustainability was, if I understand it correctly, not born of concerns about global warming but by the oil crisis of the early part of the decade and fears about our oil, gas and coal running out.
At current usage rates, India's vast coal reserves will last 500 years which, global warming nothwithstanding, is a fair amount of time to think of an alternative. If India increases its production ten-fold to result in or respond to per capita energy consumption equivalent to that of the OECD countries, however, it only takes simple artihmetic to realise supplies will be thin on the ground by about 2060. No amount of carbon capture technology will improve the situation - try telling that to the grandchildren.
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