Kalimantan Gull
Well-known member
Well, yes, 'longer', The plan''s great, like Britain to be carbon neutral by 2050, but currently they're still burning it and it's the greatest source of electrical power. Also it's a huge employer. That date may well slip (like ours probably will)
As an aside I wonder if the climate change lessons will praise Margaret Thatcher as a visionary heroine of the Green movement? Single-handedly she closed down all our dreadful coal mines ignoring all the Luddites who wanted to go on digging it out of the ground and burning it. Also she did an immense amount of environmental good by shutting down vast swathes of the steel industry and many other toxic factories, all this in the teeth of fierce opposition from people who weren't as envirionmentally far-sighted as herself.
The 'no longer' was in response to the posters assertion that they are still building coal power stations, they aren't.
Of course every economy has to make allowances to provide power when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine, and as they have such rich coal reserves and have had a referendum (tee hee) to close down their nuclear power stations, coal is obvious. Its not the whole story, the new stations they've built in the last decade are "smart" power stations that can vary output in line with renewables contributions.
Thatcher: if she had done it because of climate change then absolutely. But she didn't, she did to screw the people she didn't like, so shes still a bitch. We still had the coal powered stations, we just imported the coal instead