My house backs on to a railway line which is now exclusively for passenger trains. It wasn’t always this way though. There was a time when the relative peace was broken six times a day by the roar of freight trains heading up the Rhymney Valley. Their destination was the coal washery at Cwmbargoed, from where they would ferry thousands of tonnes of coal per journey to the power station in Aberthaw and the steel works in Port Talbot. Aberthaw power station closed at the end of March 2020. And, on 23 February this year, the last coal train made its way down the valley, taking a last load of coal to Port Talbot. Of the three, that left Port Talbot steelworks the only one still operating… although, and not for unconnected reasons, Port Talbot’s days were also numbered.
Whether Britain should still have been mining Welsh coal rather depends upon how favourable you are to exporting your carbon emissions to someone else’s country. After all – and despite expensive experimental attempts at hydrogen steel production – if you want to make virgin steel – for example if you had a plan to build and operate thousands of wind turbines – you have to use coal. That being the case, the least environmentally harmful approach would be to source it from a huge deposit 25 miles away rather than shipping it thousands of miles from Brazil, China, or Kazakhstan.
This, no doubt, was why the otherwise green-leaning Blair government gave the approval for a vast opencast mine just outside Merthyr Tydfil. As George Monbiot complained at the time:
“The diggers at Ffos-y-fran, on the outskirts of Merthyr Tydfil, are set to excavate 1,000 acres of land to a depth of 600ft. There has never been a hole quite like it in Britain, and our government’s climate change policies are about to fall into it.”
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